Five years on, Banerjee is more confident. He is awaiting his solo exhibition at the Sundaram Tagore Art gallery in Beverly Hills, LA. His works were on display at the United Nations headquarters, alongside those of six other international artists, at a show called “Art changing attitudes towards the environment” that ended on May 31. Fumio Nanjo, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, has nominated Banerjee for the Prix Pictet Prize 2008, a premiere award for sustainability photography. Vanity Fair, which profiled him in 2003, approached him last year to take photographs of Siberia’s permafrost tundra, where reindeer are dying and a powerful greenhouse gas is bubbling from the ground. The photographs were published in the magazine’s May 2008 special “green” issue.
Banerjee does not shoot too many photos. In the last eight years, he’s shot about 100 with his medium-format Nikon camera. He also does not want to jump on to any wildlife bandwagon. “I am not a chest-thumping activist. My work is a reflection of years of thought and engagement.” Which is why he has no concrete plans for India. “I have become a bit of an outsider for my country,” he says. “But I am afraid that the tremendous progress India is making may destroy her ecological fabric. If we pollute the rivers the way China has done, it would be a serious issue.”
For now, though, his creative energy is spent in the Arctic. How does he define his relationship with that region? “It’s the place where I learnt to see.”