1. Home
2. 8

AWARDS AND HONOURS

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 8/1/2020 10:45:53 AM

Pablo Bartholomew: Recipient of Padma Shri

Pablo Bartholomew is a photojournalist and an independent photographer based in New Delhi, India. He is noted for his photography, as an educator running photography workshops, and as manager of MediaWeb, a software company specialising in photo database solutions and server-based digital archiving systems. He was honoured in 2013, with the fourth highest civilian awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India. The older of two siblings, Bartholomew was born on 18 December 1955 in New Delhi, India. His father, Richard Bartholomew (1926–1985) was a Burmese refugee who settled in the Indian Capital and who came to be one of the country's leading art critics, as well as a painter, poet, and photographer. His mother, Rati Batra, a Partition refugee, was a well-known theatre activist and one of the founding members of Yatrik, a theatre company established in 1964. Bartholomew studied at Modern School, where his father taught English. He abandoned his schooling in Class Nine, adopting the camera instead. In his early teens he photographed his family, friends, people, and cities. He participated in the city’s emerging theatre scene and even produced, in the ’70s, a series of events called “Thru Pablo’s Eyes” which was based on rock music accompanied with slide and film projection and live performers. To make ends meet, and to finance his photo documentary projects, he worked in advertising and as a stills photographer, most notably on the sets of Satyajit Ray's Shatranj ke Khilari (1977) and Richard Attenborough's 1982-film, Gandhi. In 1975, he was awarded First Prize by World Press Photo for his series "Time is the mercy of eternity," on morphine addicts in India titled Time is the Mercy of Eternity. From 1984 until 2000, Bartholomew was represented by the French-American news photo agency, Gamma Liaison during which time he primarily covered conflicts and developments in the South Asian region. His photographs were published in New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Business Week, National Geographic, GEO, Der Spiegel, Figaro, Paris Match, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Guardian, and Observer Magazine, among others. He incisively covered the catastrophic Bhopal Gas Tragedy, the funeral of Indira Gandhi and aftermath of her assassination, the Hindu-Sikh riots, the rise of the Khalistani movement, the political career of Rajiv Gandhi, the funeral of Mother Teresa, the cyclones in Bangladesh, the Nellie conflict in Assam, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which almost got him killed among many other news stories.