Lucknow: For 40 years, Mirza Raza Ali Khan has watched Lucknow unfold through the viewfinder of his camera. At Bada Imambara, where tourists arrive with phones held high today, the 66-year-old photographer still carries a camera and the memories of an era when getting a photograph clicked was an occasion in itself.His lens has, over the decades, turned towards some of the biggest names to visit the city — around 50 celebrities, including Hema Malini, Kamal Haasan, Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Farooq Sheikh, Vinod Kambli, Asha Parekh, Ghulam Ali, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Mohammad Azharuddin, Chunky Panday, Bhagyashree, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan and Yusuf Pathan. More recently, he clicked actors Preity Zinta and Sunny Deol during their Lucknow visit for the promotion of ‘Batwara’.But ask Khan about the photograph he remembers most vividly and he goes back to the 1990s. It was the time when “Dream Girl” Hema Malini visited Lucknow as part of a visit involving a Sri Lankan delegation. For Khan, capturing her through his lens was more than just another assignment — it became one of the defining moments of his long career. Then there was Chunky Panday, who amused him by getting nearly 30 photographs clicked, and comedian Jagdeep, who had the onlookers in splits with his antics.Khan never planned to become a photographer. The idea came to him during an ordinary outing with his daughter at Buddha Park. “We got our photograph clicked. In those days, the film had to be sent to Delhi and it cost around Rs 50. I thought, why not start photography myself,” he recalls.That thought became a profession. At a time when photographs took days to develop, Khan would send pictures of celebrities by post. A photograph was something people waited for, treasured and preserved.Today, that world has almost disappeared.“With the advent of smartphones, the craze for getting photographs clicked by photographers has reduced. I get very few customers now. There is hardly any work left,” Khan says.He has therefore chosen a different path for his son. Rather than encourage him to enter photography, Khan has allowed him to build a business dealing in antique items.Still, Khan remains where he has spent most of his working life — at Bada Imambara, camera in hand. The crowds may now prefer smartphones, but his camera carries something no phone can capture: four decades of Lucknow, frozen one frame at a time.
