Photo Journalist Sumit K. Dutt

Sunil K Dutt is a name to eckon-with, in the field of creative photography in India. Born in 1939, Sunil K Dutt is best known as the photo chronicler of Saint Teresa's life and work. Dutt is also famous for his vignettes of Kolkata life. Beautiful colonial architecture, crumbling streets with the faded glamour of British India's capital city till
1911, Calcutta (now Kolkata) is a romance trapped in time. We take a nostalgic look at the city through the lens of Sunil K Dutt. His frames explore the charming character of Kolkata's numerous streets, by lanes, tea-stalls and street corners that give the city its life. Dutt never planned of having a career in the field of photography at first. When he was writing in Dr Karuna Mukherjee's magazine Gharani, he was advised to give visual support to his writings to make the subjects more attractive. That was the starting point of his journey with photography. He started to take photographs to make his articles more attractive and later he chose it as his career and started working as a professional photographer for the rest of his life. At the early stage of his career as a photographer, he was appointed to take Saint Teresa’s photographs by the editor of Junior Statesman, published from Kolkata, Desmon Doig, the writer of Calcutta: An Artist’s impression, Mother Teresa: Her people and Her Work and many more books. This assignment was the turning point of Dutt's career.

By the end of the 1960s, a documentary was made on Saint Teresa and in the early 1970. the first ever book on her, Something Beautiful for God was published by Harper Collins (based on the documentary). It was written and undertaken Muggeridge with the photographs of Saint Teresa snapped by Sunil K Dutt. Dutt’s pictorial book titled Kolkata Canvas portrays the life of Kolkata. It is more than 100 photographs on various aspects of city and reality. Dutt’s other pictorial books are Robir Aloy Alokchitro, Durga Puja, Amay Gach Kore Dao, Shantiniketan, Mother Teresa – Down Memory Lane.
However, Dutt deserves much greater applaud as a photographer as well as photojournalist in his more than fifty years spanned service inthis field.

Dutta’s works have been displayed and exhibited across the world including Brick Lane Art Gallery, UK, Kodak's International office at Rochester, USA, British National Museum of Photography and Television, ACCU (a part of UNESCO) in Tokyo, Kolkata International Photography Festival (KIPF-2019), Indian Museum, Victoria Memorial Hall, Gaganendra Shilpa Pradarshashala , The Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Maya Art Space, Kolkata, India, and other prestigious galleries throughout the world.

Dutt has received numerous awards and recognition like Christopher Award from New York in1971, The Japan Airlines Prize in 1988, Fuji Film Prize in 1987. In the same year, Dutt was selected as one of the ten ‘best photojournalists of the world’ by Photographic Society of America. West Bengal Government has honoured him with SHILPI SOMMANONA award in 2019

Kolkata based DNV Industries Pvt. Ltd. in collaboration with Abundant Art Gallery, UK have recently executed restoration & archival preservation of a major number of the iconic photographs of Sri Sunil K Dutt.