A long love affair with his camera and trains led champion dilettante GARNEY NYSS to travel all over India the '40s and photograph Indian cities. result—a dusty black-and-white portfolio of the Indian metropolises, meticulously preserved. "I never th
GARNEY Nyss is still crazy after all these years. Last week, the dapper septuagenarian shot a high school reunion on his favourite Rolleiflex camera, played a game of tennis at local club and taught steel guitar riffs to admiring students at a music school. In etween, he walked into his publisher's fice in a south Calcutta neighbourhood to discuss the layout of his forthcoming book, a -picture celebration of how India looked years ago.
Photography is only one of Nyss's passion. Anglo-Indian was one of India's niftiest ockey players (played for Bengal for a ecord 18 years, was acknowledged as the country's finest left-wing; and at 20, was hought too young to be in the 1932 Olympics team); a speed skating champion; prime athlete (clocking an admirable 10 seconds for a 100-yard run); a club ague level cricketer (a batsman and a egspinner who played with C.K. Nayadu) a badminton and tennis player of considerable repute. He has also taken great photographs, made fascinating documentaries, cut albums with folk and country music bands, and is an ornithologist.
His true metier? "An all-rounder par excel-ence, a patron saint of versatility," says ry O'Brien, noted quiz master, publisher, entrepreneur and now head of Calcutta-based Heritage Resources Private Limited. He should know. Two years ago, in a happy accident, he stumbled onto 'Uncle' Garney's collection of greying, dusty picture albums his unkempt two-room Park Street apartment during a routine visit. This treasure ove of old pictures, handsome black-and-white images of Indian life and times in the 1940s, are now finding their way first into India: 50 Years Ago, a Heritage publication sponsored by Steel Authority of India Limited, and later into Calcutta Through The ar, an album of rare pictures taken of the during the Second World War.
"I always did things which gave me pleasure, I was never a hard-boiled professional. such things (books) are all rewards in a way," he says. Not that he cared for rewards, anyway. Nyss is a quintessential amateur of yore. His work—dribbling, clicking, working a riff—is that of a disciplined amateur with an exceptional eye for perfection and detail. Skills that are immediately apparent his photography.
ROWING up in the misty chill of Darjeeling, Nyss was fascinated by the toy train chugging up the mountain every day. The day (his eighth birthday) his father gifted a Rs 8 Kodak Brownie box camera, Nyss decided to capture these images for posteri-. "I got hooked to photography clicking ains, mountains, and what not," he counts. Nyss's early photographs of Darjeeling are poetic black-and-white essays clouds, mists, trains and mountain loops.
Over the years, between various odd-—as proof reader in a government press, manager with the fabled Bourne and Shepard studios in downtown Calcutta—Nyss indulged his passion with his Rs 30 Agfa and Ensign bellow cameras, later on a pocket Kodak and finally on his proud- possession, the Rolleiflex with 2.8 lenses was bought at a steep Rs 500. In the '30s the '40s, Nyss made his professional mark as the photographer for weddings in Calcutta. If you were getting married and wanted a memorable album, you simply hired Nyss on the condition you would buy minimum of 12 photographs at Rs 25 apiece. Which meant Nyss was richer by at east Rs 250 for every marriage he caught on camera. "I must have recorded thousands of eddings," he says. "Anglo-Indian weddings, Punjabi weddings, Bengali weddings, Marwari weddings, the works."
Nyss is also a peripatetic bachelor, traveling all over the country by train, shooting pictures of cities and people in faithful black white, preserving them in albums with pithy captions. A host of this work appears his forthcoming book, the record of a mature amateur with a yen for a bare bones, stripped down, honest photography of life times with an unerring attention to detail. Nyss himself is casual about it all: "Oh, I just went along and clicked. I loved travelling, and I loved taking pictures."
His versatility is mind-boggling, so is his approach to the arts. His 16-mm documentaries in colour shot on a Rs 2,000 Paillard Bolex camera may be out of circulation today, but reveal an amazing grasp over ange of subjects: a 20-minute film on Mother Teresa, 'three reels' of the Queen's sit to India in 1960 and Moths and Butterflies, a 20-minute documentary commissioned by the Government of India.
And when his absorption with the camera wanes, he turns to the steel guitar. An obsession that has produced 500 AIR broadcasts over a hundred albums. First, he led the ounge act Aloha Boys, singing Jim Reeves, King Cole and Bing Crosby and bringing house down. And when some of the boys quit the act, Nyss promptly formed The Harmonisers "with a couple of girls", a four-piece-guitar-drums-ukelele combo belting folk and country, Eric Clapton ballads Neil Diamond standards to packed audiences. And they still manage to work up a etty good jam with Nyss continuing to ont the band.
What does he love most? Playing a hot, cover of the Tiger Rag, capturing another vignette of the big city bustle on film or executing a stinging backhand on the South Club tennis courts? Probably all. At 79, the amateur leads a busy life. Who cares about the rest?