Bollywood’s shot story

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How does it feel to be famous? What kind of life do celebrities have? What lies beyond the glitz and glamour of tinseltown? These are some of the perplexing questions that fans as well as non-fans face. Living the Dream by Mark Bennington is a documentation that passionately presents a visual encyclopaedia of working actors, stars, mega-stars, up-and-comers, character actors and strugglers of Bollywood, illustrating the complexity of the world’s largest acting community.

Mark’s rendezvous with the Indian film industry happened casually during a trip to Mumbai in January 2010. He says, “I was contemplating a compare and contrast of the acting communities in Hollywood and Bollywood. I was in Mumbai for two weeks after having travelled up north for three weeks and by great serendipity met Guneet Monga, who introduced me to about 20 actors in one week. I returned to the States with the dream of turning the photo-essay into a book and concentrating just on the acting community in Mumbai. I came back to India in November 2010 and with commendable help from Shanoo Sharma, casting director for Yash Raj Films, I could dream of a full-fledged book.”
Before the photography bug bit him, he himself was facing the camera as a stage actor. For a good 10 years he was doing everything from Ibsen’s Enemy of the People with Sir Ian McKellen to VIP with Pamela Anderson in New York and Los Angeles. And then photography had him in 2003. “As luck would have it, I picked up my grandfather’s treasured possessions — three very nice cameras and 10 equally good lenses. I was looking for a change. It was not a mid-life crisis for me, just a craving for change. My grandfather was an amateur photographer and I guess I inherited this passion for light from him. I touched his cameras and thought I will be a photographer,” he says.
From there on for the next six to seven months he did some professional work and within nine months was making a decent living. “Then I met National Geographic veteran David Alan Harvey, who is revered as a visual storyteller around the world. One day Harvey and I were talking about book ideas, he convinced me to do a documentary on the actors’ ‘real’ life. As I was an actor myself, I realised how obscure our lives are. With this germ of an idea, I began to see how I could now tell the story of an actor’s off-screen life,” he says.
In the past few months, Mark has photographed around 100 actors including Dev Anand, Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Deepti Naval, Shabana Azmi and motormouth Rakhi Sawant among many others. So, after having spent five months in Mumbai and numerous nights watching tonnes of Bollywood potboilers, what does he think about our film industry?
“Previously, Bollywood to me was glam, glitz, joy, song and drama, loads of emotions. I had only seen Slumdog..., which a British film and a couple of films by Mira Nair. But now the definition has undergone a sea change. India has a great knack for telling stories and that hardly happens in the States. Now Hindi cinema is going through a buzzing phase, where independent, low-budget and provocative films are making money while driving home a point,” sums up Mark, adding that he is loving every bit of India.