Sri Aurobindo: Selected Photos

Language: English
Pages: 298 (Throughout B/W Illustrations)


Foreword of the publisher

Four years after publishing a book with selected photos of the Mother, we are happy to present the companion book with pictures of Sri Aurobindo. The basic concept of both publications is the same. We aim at giving access to the depth of spiritual vibration which radiates from Sri Aurobindo's photos. We are not trying to provide a pictorial biography or satisfy intellectual curiosity. Therefore we have purposely refrained from using a chronological sequence to the pictures.

Many of Sri Aurobindo's photos, now being sold, have somehow been touched up or restored from the material that was available. Sometimes the expression of Sri Aurobindo thereby is distorted and not much is left from his original aura, which is the thing we are hunting for in this book. We have avoided as much as possible to repair or improve on the old negatives that we had as the base for this book. Whenever we had several versions of an old picture, we have chosen the less altered one.

There are four categories of pictures. The "historical" pictures of Sri Aurobindo's youth in England and of his political period before his imprisonment; pictures of his prison-time in Alipore and his early stay in Pondicherry; the pictures taken by Cartier-Bresson within a period of just three days in April 1950; and pictures of his Maha samadhi. We had the great good fortune to receive a full set of negatives (there exist three or four such sets) of the Cartier-Bresson photographs; scanned them in Germany; and used them as one of the main materials for this publication. During his short stay in Pondicherry, Cartier-Bresson had not only taken pictures of Sri Aurobindo, but also of the daily Ashram life. Some of those pictures we h