He was already there
when the century arrived.

Where they sent him.

A cameraman is only ever as good as the places he was trusted to stand. These were his.

1939

A press card, and a camera

He begins as a news reporter with a camera. The war is three weeks old. The trade he is walking into will not survive the century in the form he finds it.

1944

Indian News Parade

He joins the government newsreel and begins filming a country that is three years from becoming itself.

1945

Staff cameraman, British Paramount News

Among the first Indians the foreign agencies put on staff. His rushes leave Delhi in tins and return as newsreels in cinemas that will never know his name.

Ved Parkash · from the archive

1947

Partition — and a house of his own

He films the largest movement of people the century will produce, crossing a border drawn weeks earlier. In the same year he opens Ved Films, and stops being a man other houses call.

1948

Mahatma Gandhi's funeral

He is on the route with the camera running. The coverage wins him a British Academy Award — the first Indian cameraman to be so honoured — and the negative is accessioned into the British Paramount News archive in London, where it has remained ever since.

1953

Director Cameraman, United Nations

Posted to New York. He shoots the documentary reels and cuts the weekly record of the General Assembly — a Delhi newsreel man filming the world argue with itself.

1958

Pathé News, London · Hearst Metrotone News

Two more of the great newsreel houses, with documentaries for USIS and German television in Hamburg running alongside.

1961

Associated Rediffusion — and an interview with Nehru

Programming filmed in India for British television, including a sitting with the Prime Minister.

1962

Five programmes for David Brinkley's Journal — in colour

Shot on Ektachrome, when colour was still an event rather than an assumption. The same winter he is on the Chinese border.

1971

The war of 1971

Another border, another set of tins sent out. By now the agencies run his footage without asking who shot it.

Today

The house, under Rajiv Parkash

Ved Films still works from Delhi under Rajiv Parkash. The stock changed. The address did not.

Twenty-four films.

Commercials, corporate pictures and campaign work made in the same building. Choose a frame and it runs.

Founded by a cameraman.
It still behaves like one.

A working plant,
not a hire desk.

Camera, sound and edit sit under one roof and answer to each other, so the picture is held from the first day of shooting to the last pass of the mix.

Who has trusted
the lens.

Tell us where the camera
should stand.

Send the brief, the date and the place. We will tell you what it takes.