He spends a lot of time reading in the loo. Sitting on his table right now are Barry Long’s Journal, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Fuzzy Thinking by Bart Kosko. But he’s no litterateur.
He has groomed art directors, creative directors and fashion design students, but he is no teacher.
He has seen auras in oranges and blues hitting the earth at Vermont, but he’s no aura reader. He has walked around wearing a pyramid plastic cap, but he’s no pyramid healer.
The truth is Yadeva Prakash (better known as Yadev) is an electronics engineer turned lensman. And the 36-year-old proprietor of Wild City Studios based in Bangalore (with a branch in Los Angeles) insists the background has helped. “There is a lot of physics in photography,” he says. “I was to shoot for the cover page of Intel’s in-house magazine and the brief was I had to give it a space feel that also included an explosion. It took me just 15 seconds of camera exposure. I hung firecrackers vertically at different levels and captured every explosion using different filters. The result was explosions in six different colours of different sizes and all of that in one long exposure.”
Yadev’s portfolio runs the entire gamut. He spent three days with Persian cats for a feature he was doing for the 25th anniversary issue of Stardust in 1997. He shot the fronts of houses belonging to Hollywood hotshots on Beverly Hills for Special Publication, a speciality magazine based in Florida. He has also shot pin up models for Nem Media in Los Angeles.
“When I am not working, I am usually exploring new places,” he says. Some of the places he has captured on film include the red hills, which is 45 kilometres away from Ooty and Magod Falls in north Karnataka near Karwar.
Yadev has had his close encounters. “I was assigned by the Karnataka power corporation to photograph all the dams in the state,” he says. “When I was at the Supa dam, I was standing bang in front of the sluice gates that were shut for some reason. In the rush to shoot it, I waved at the man to open the sluice gates, and the next moment, I see a sheet of water heading towards me, and I scooted with my camera just in time.”
The assignment came along quite by fluke. “When I was returning from Mysore, I took some pictures of the sunset from behind the car,” he recalls. “In the process, I took some interesting shots of the high tension wires. So when the power corporation PRO saw these pictures, he chose these pictures for his ad campaign and also gave me another assignment on dams.”
Photography happened without real intent. “My uncle gifted a Canon SLR camera to me when I was in college and I used to walk around BMS College taking pictures of stuff happening on campus for the college paper,” says the self-taught lensman. “After college, the only thing I seemed to be good at was photography and I stuck to it.”
Some of his clients over the past 15 years include ITC, Pepsi, GE Group, BPL, HMT, Infosys, Alcatel, Arvind Brands, Telco, Metsu and many more. Along the side, he has trained fashion design students and art directors in the play of light and shadows that’s essential to photography. And he does 35 mm, medium format and large format, besides building websites for models (including registering the domain name).
But when Yadev is not bothered about photography, he’s either people-watching at pubs or playing football on weekends and mending Italian figurines and other bric-a-brac.
Not to mention he’s moody. Says he: “When I am free, I travel, sometimes not knowing where I am going. Once I reached Simla and called home to say where I was.”
And what’s tangible is his will power. “I intend to hold an exhibition of nudes at an art gallery and also come out with a book on them.”
Yadev may be reached at: info@yadev.com.
FAST FACTS
Yadeva Prakash, 36
Runs Wild City Studios
Electronics engineer turned self-taught photographer
In the field for 15 years; has groomed corporates and design students
Done campaigns for ITC, Pepsi, Caterpillar, Telco, Tatra, Metsu and Harry & Luitt
Loves people watching at pubs and playing football on weekends
Plans on writing a book on nudes and holding an exhibition on the same subject
(First published in City Reporter, 2003)