At the age of nine, Haran Kumar was a street child living in a railway station in Delhi, India’s capital.
By 21 his debut solo exhibition, Street Life, which focused on the lives of Delhi’s homeless children, announced his arrival as an exciting young talent on the country’s photographic scene.
The journey beggars belief.
Of the circumstances leading to him becoming a nine-year-old run-away, Kumar says: “I was too scared of my father beating me up. He loved me, but he beat me, so before my mother gave him the letter from my teacher [about his month-long truanting from school], I took 20 rupees from his pocket and left home.”
Unable to concentrate at school, he bunked, until the day the letter arrived. From then he appears to have placed an astonishing level of trust in his own independence. And fate.
Kumar hopped on to a bus and rode it until its last stop — Delhi Railway Station. There he spent almost a month gathering waste to sell for recycling and carrying luggage for passengers.
The day he was approached by someone from the Salaam Baalak Trust, a street children’s NGO, his stomach was empty.
“In India, people always say these NGOs are like prisons for children, so I only went for lunch. But the place was nice and the children seemed happy. I left, then I stopped and asked myself why I was leaving. At the station there were a lot of problems: the police beating you without any reason, no one to care for you if you were sick, nowhere to sleep — So I returned to the NGO,” he says.
There Kumar spent almost 10 years, he returned to school and his grades improved dramatically: “I started getting the best marks in class — I think because at home I had fear and there was no one to counsel me,” he says.
As Kumar grew “anxious” about his future career, a 2001 photography workshop at the Salaam Baalak Trust, conducted by photographer Amit Khullar, proved serendipitous: “I didn’t know what job I was going to do and I was getting too old to stay at the NGO. When the NGO people developed my roll after I went out to shoot the street children, they were very, very happy with my pictures — and that is when I thought I could do this as a career,” he says.
What followed included part-time jobs as a waiter to buy film for his 40-year-old Nikon F4 (a gift from Khullar), the occasional stint as an assistant to Khullar and working as a photographic laboratory assistant at Rai University, in between saving up to buy his first camera, a Nikon F55. And much time spent perfecting his technique on the completely manual Nikon F4. “I’ve always liked to click,” he laughs.
Sitting in a Durban hotel cafe, with stripes carved into his hair, and hip, branded clothing, Kumar appears every bit the successful commercial photographer. He won India’s Nirman Award for most talented photographer in 2005, a month-long scholarship with United Colours of Benetton in 2006 and spent time as a news photographer at the Times of India.
In Durban to conduct youth workshops as part of the Shared Histories — An Indian Experience multidisciplinary festival, which also runs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Kumar’s photographs are included in the Inner Voices photography segment, together with those of Vicky Roy — another runaway turned photographer.
When, in 2003, the Indian Habitat Centre in Delhi exhibited the fruits of a street child photography project from two years earlier, the enthusiastic response to his work prompted Kumar to decide on a solo exhibition drawn from his past life.
“I spoke to Amit about my plans, but he told me that everyone knew about the poverty, the suffering and sadness of the street children. I needed to do something different. So I wanted to get into their personal lives, to show the perfect moments that also happen for them — they don’t know much about the world. All they know is the street and they are happy with that,” he says.
Every photographer has a personal relationship with the moment, when the eye and the finger come together to create something completely idio-syncratic. For Kumar, it is the ability to capture those moments that slip through the guardedness and hardness that the street scars children with.
“My pictures are all about the expression. Always focusing on the perfect, smiling eyes — the smile,” says Kumar, who admits preferring black-and-white film because it is a “dream-like colour”.
Kumar remembers those days without a family as “dark”, but admits it has left him with a life philosophy based on living every second to its fullest. And that includes fulfilling every ounce of his potential — fuelled by a remarkable determination.
Remembering his meeting with his family again as a 14-year-old (he was “too scared” of his father to go back earlier), he says he cried with his mother and siblings (he has four). But he was also determined to return to the private boarding school the Salaam Baalak Trust had placed him in outside Delhi, rather than return home.
“I wanted to do something different. On my own. I want to make my own way, doing something different. I represent all those people from the street who have talent but no way of expressing that,” he says.
Inner Voices exhibits at the Durban ICC until August 31 and at the Sandton Art Centre, Sandton Square, Johannesburg, from September 5 until October 5
Awaken the Young Citizen workshops will be held at Durban’s Nelson Mandela Youth Centre in Chatsworth on August 28, Proudly Mannenberg in Cape Town from September 1 to 3 and the University of Johannesburg, Soweto Campus from September 5 to 8