Ramesh Dobhal keeps his negatives in a tin trunk under his bed. There are thousands of them — 35mm strips in paper sleeves, medium format squares, a few early digital memory cards rubber-banded together in a separate box. The archive begins in 1984, when he was nineteen years old and had saved enough from his father’s shop to buy a secondhand Yashica camera from a dealer in Paltan Bazaar.

“That camera cost me four hundred rupees,” he says, pouring tea in the small room that serves as his studio, darkroom, and sitting area in his home in Dalanwala. “Today if you sell one photograph that amount is nothing. But then — that was a lot of money for me.”

Starting Out

Dobhal did not study photography formally. He learned by doing — shooting rolls of film, developing them in a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of his family home, studying the results, shooting again. His early work is the kind that most photographers try to forget: over-exposed street scenes, blurry portraits, compositions that miss by a crucial few centimetres. He shows them without embarrassment.

“You have to make the bad photographs first,” he says. “There’s no shortcut.”

His first published photograph appeared in a local Hindi daily in 1986 — a picture of the aftermath of a minor flood near Rispana bridge. The newspaper paid him twelve rupees. He kept the clipping for years. He is not sure where it is now.

The Dehradun He Photographed

Looking through Dobhal’s archive is an experience that people who have lived in Dehradun for a long time find quietly devastating. The city he photographed in the 1980s and 1990s is recognisable in its bones but almost unrecognisable in its texture.

The Rispana river, which today runs as a narrow, polluted channel through the city, appears in his early photographs as a wide, clear waterway where children swim and women wash clothes on flat stones. Rajpur Road, now a continuous strip of commercial buildings, was in his 1989 photographs a road lined with old trees whose canopies met overhead, creating a tunnel of shade.

He has a series of photographs of Paltan Bazaar from 1991 that are among his best — dense, busy, full of faces — that look almost like another city. The shops are smaller. The crowds are different. A bullock cart appears in one frame.

What He Makes of the Change

“I don’t feel sad exactly,” he says, and seems to be genuinely thinking about this. “When you photograph a place for forty years, you understand that change is what places do. What I feel is — I wish more people had been paying attention. Because once it’s gone, you only understand what you had by looking at pictures.”

He shoots digitally now, a concession he resisted longer than most. He still prefers black and white. He still walks with a camera every morning, a habit unbroken for four decades. He photographs the city now with the same attention he brought to it when it was younger and so was he.

“The city is still interesting,” he says. “It is just interesting in different ways.” He picks up his camera. There is somewhere he wants to be before the light changes.