Cinematographer chronicles over 600 single screens in photographs

One dark evening in Go-a’s Agassaim village a few years ago, 53-year old cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi caused a minor hullabaloo when he entered an abandoned single-screen theatre in his perennial all white kurta-pajama.

- Sharmila Ganesan

“I was mistaken for a ghost,” says Chaturvedi, recalling the only time he had scared others during his 32,000-km camera-toting journey across 11 Indian states during which he was kicked by a donkey, attacked by a Billy goat and given a “near-death experience” by a feisty Rottweiler. “I was even caned by a chowkidar in Pune,” brags Chaturvedi, who encountered bats, spiders, scorpions, pigeons, snakes, wasps, ants, cows and drug addicts on his oft-kurta-ripping, two-year-long quest to photograph and record the “tragic beauty” of the country’s endangered single-screen theatres.