Faces And Facets: DAG's Nemai Ghosh Exhibition Brings Satyajit Ray In Colour To Mumbai

Twenty-five years after Satyajit Ray's death, DAG is bringing Mumbai a side of the filmmaker rarely seen in public: his world in colour. "Faces and Facets: Satyajit Ray in Colour," an exhibition of photographs by Nemai Ghosh — the man Ray called his own "Boswell with a camera" — opens at DAG's gallery inside The Taj Mahal Palace, Colaba, on Thursday, September 10, with a reception from 7 to 9 pm. The show remains on view from September 11 to October 31, 2026.

Who Was Nemai Ghosh

Nemai Ghosh (1934-2020) began his career not behind a camera but on stage, working with Utpal Dutt's Little Theatre Group in Kolkata. He picked up a camera almost by chance around 1966, and by 1969 had begun what would become a 22-year assignment: shadowing Satyajit Ray as his official still photographer, starting with Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and continuing through to the director's final film, Agantuk, in 1991. "I started following him like his shadow," Ghosh once said of those years. "I was crazy about capturing him in my camera every moment... my fascination for Manikda was like that - unbridled, unreasonable." Ray himself described Ghosh as a kind of "Boswell of his life with a camera," while Henri Cartier-Bresson called him Ray's "photo-biographer." Beyond his Ray archive, Ghosh spent decades documenting Kolkata's theatre, art and cultural circles in black and white — work that eventually earned him a jury seat at the 2007 National Film Awards and a Padma Shri in 2010.

A Rarer, More Intimate Ray

Ghosh is best known for his black-and-white portraits of Ray — stark, intimate images that have shaped how the world pictures the director. "Faces and Facets" deliberately looks past that archive to focus only on his colour work, made across the same two decades. Free of monochrome's austerity, the photographs restore the warmth of Ray's interiors, the play of light across a room, and the textures of the spaces where he wrote, sketched, scored and directed. The exhibition follows him through location scouts near Darjeeling, on set directing actors, sketching costumes, at the piano, in the editing room, and in conversation with fellow artists like Benode Behari Mukherjee — tracing not just the filmmaker at work, but the painterly sensibility he carried from his years at Santiniketan into everything he made.

On View At DAG, The Taj Mahal Palace

The Mumbai edition follows the exhibition's debut run at DAG's New Delhi gallery earlier this year. For its Mumbai leg, the show moves into DAG's space inside The Taj Mahal Palace in Colaba — one of the city's most storied addresses, now hosting one of Indian cinema's most private archives. The opening reception is on Thursday, September 10, 2026, from 7 to 9 pm, with the exhibition open to visitors from September 11 through October 31, 2026, at DAG, The Taj Mahal Palace, Colaba, Mumbai.