Sam Tata

Samuel Bejan Tata (September 30, 1911 – July 3, 2005) was a Chinese photographer and photojournalist of Parsi descent.

Tata grew up in Shanghai where he learned the basics of photography from several mentors including Lang Jingshan and Liu Xucang.

Due to political unrest, he mostly confined himself in his early career to portraiture in the tradition of pictorialism.

Samuel Bejan Tata was born in Shanghai, China, on September 30, 1911, to a mercantile Parsi family.

He went to Shanghai Public School, and then studied business for two years at the University of Hong Kong.

He took up photography at the age of twenty-four, and was one of the founding members of the Shanghai Camera Club.

A friend at the club, Alex Buchman, who was working as a photojournalist for the China Press, inspired Tata to buy his first Leica and roam the streets for meaningful images.

His focus on portraiture in these years was partly dictated by the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1937, and Tata was not able to take up photography full-time until 1946 when he arrived in Calcutta.

In 1939, he learned academic studio portraiture with Oscar Seepol, and he later studied with the photographers Lang Jingshan and Liu Xucang.

He became adept in his early photographs with the use of lighting and the additive techniques favoured by the pictorialists.

In 1946, he moved to India for two years where he took up photography full-time.

A friendship begun in Bombay with the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson transformed his approach, with an emphasis towards street photography and a more natural style in his portraits.

Tata returned to Shanghai and photographed, for some months accompanied by Cartier-Bresson, the occupation of the city by the new Communist regime.

Tata's first exhibition, featuring his pictorialist portraits and Lang's landscapes, was held in 1946.

In November 1947, through the efforts of the Indian pictorialist Jehangir N. Unwalla, sixty of Tata's photographs were presented in Bombay.

The foreword by Unwalla in the exhibition catalogue cited Julian Smith and Edward Steichen as influences on Tata.

Several months later, at another show sponsored by the Bombay Art Society, Tata met French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and through his influence and mentorship, was galvanized to take up photojournalism with renewed vigour.

He began to contribute to Bombay periodicals such as Trend and Flashlight.

In 1949, he returned to Shanghai, where he recorded the fall of the Kuomintang and the takeover of the city by Communist troops; for a period he was accompanied by Cartier-Bresson.

Starting in the 1950s, Tata engaged in assignments for prominent magazines such as National Geographic.

Tata remained in the city until 1952.

In that year, he married 19 year-old Marketa (Rita) Langer, a Sudenten Czech, who like Tata, had been raised in Shanghai.

They soon fled to Hong Kong.

During this period, many of Tata's early photographs were seized by the Chinese censors.

However, he managed to smuggle his images of the revolution out of China with the help of a diplomat.

He made a trip to Kashmir and India in 1955, and his photo-essay, "Himalyan Pilgrimage", was published by National Geographic in October 1956.

Via Hong Kong and India, Tata emigrated to Montreal in 1956, where he created documentary stills for the National Film Board and continued photography for various publications.

He became known for his portraits of Canadian artists and authors.

Tata's work has been the subject of books and touring exhibitions, and his photographs are found in several institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada.

Tata immigrated, with his wife and daughter Antonia, to Canada in 1956 and settled in Montreal.

He quickly found work doing stills for documentary films made at the National Film Board, and he became a photo editor for The Montrealer magazine.

Partly due to their age difference, Tata's marriage ended in divorce.

In the early 1960s, rejecting his former academic style, he destroyed most of his pictorial work apart from the portraits.

Tata's photographs continued to appear in publications such as Macleans, Chatelaine, and Time.

He recoiled at being a mere illustrator to a written text as his aim was for the images to stand on their own.

Tata came closest to this ideal in his submissions to the magazine Perspectives, where he was allowed to choose from his photo files.

Sometimes on assignment, but increasingly on his own initiative, he began to amass a portfolio of Canadian literary and artistic figures, including Michel Tremblay, Leonard Cohen, Bill Reid, Irving Layton, George Bowering, Donald Sutherland, Alice Munro, and Jacques de Tonnancour.

Tata preferred to take pictures with a 35mm camera and use the available light in the homes of his subjects, where they would feel more at ease and their personalities be more fully evoked by posing amidst their personal possessions.

His flowing conversational style, abounding in stories and anecdotes, also helped allay sitters who were sometimes wary of being photographed.

Tata's experience was that the better portraits often started to appear in the middle of the film roll, after subjects had relaxed their guard and became active participants.