India – Emaho caught up with celebrated Indian Photographer Swapan Parekh who is  widely acclaimed for having brought  the documentary aesthetic to Indian advertising photography, his personal works remained rooted in the terrain of black-and-white photography, little of which has been seen in India.   Kishor Parekh, your father, was a pioneer photojournalist. What was his role in your becoming a photographer? It was the untimely death of my father, the legendary photojournalist Kishor Parekh that threw me into this arena. I was 16 then, studying science and had never really picked up a camera. And like all young sons believed, their dads, their heroes, aren’t supposed to die. I did not even know how to mourn his sudden passing away like this. I remember going and opening his cupboard, burying my head in his clothes with the yearning to smell him one last time and take a pledge, that I want to be a photographer thereon. Till today I hear stories about how he revolutionised Indian reportage photography in the 1960’s; and though he and I are very different kind of photographers, there is so much I would have liked to share with him.Maybe the only consolation is, this early abandonment perhaps helped me etch my own identity, growing outside the shadow of his colossal presence.   Ad based on the theme – Death of The Computer   You’re accredited for a unique style of adding a documentary aesthetic within your advertising work. Tell us a little about this style you developed. Having studied documentary photography in New York in the 1980s, I came back and did a few news and documentary projects here in India. But soon I realised that shooting distressed India for a foreign audience was irritating me. Almost coincidently at this time my work was noticed by a certain art-director Prashant Godbole, who felt that this style of mine could be used in advertising work, as nobody else was doing this. We did our first campaign together, entirely the way I wanted to shoot it and on my editorial terms. It was instantly noticed. That started a life long bond between Prashant and me. He and others like the legendary ad-man Mohammad Khan gave me campaigns where I could do my thing by virtually conceiving, executing, processing my film, …