Nemai Ghosh, veteran photographer best known for biographing Ray’s life in pictures, died at his home on Wednesday morning. He was 87.

“He died around 7.10am. He was suffering from cardiac and respiratory problems,” said Chitta Ghosh, his 79-year-old brother who lived with Nemai Ghosh at their home near Purna cinema in Bhowanipore.

Ghosh is survived by a son and a daughter. “He suffered a fracture after a fall at home in December 2019. He was slowly making a comeback after surgery,” said son Satyaki Ghosh, a Mumbai-based photographer. He could not make it to Calcutta because of the lockdown.

Ghosh started working with Ray in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) and was with him till his last film, Agantuk (1991).

“For close to 25 years, Nemai Ghosh has been assiduously photographing me in action and repose — a sort of Boswell working with a camera rather than a pen,” Ray had written about Ghosh, comparing him with James Boswell, the Scottish biographer and friend of English writer Samuel Johnson.

Ghosh also worked with the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. “Nemai Ghosh allows us to be intimate with filmmaking, and to feel with great fidelity the drive, the alertness and the profundity of this giant of cinema in all his majestic stature,” Cartier-Bresson wrote in the foreword of Ghosh’s book, Satyajit Ray at 70.

“Ghosh not only shot Ray’s films. He chronicled Ray’s life and work through his pictures. It is no small thing that Ray allowed Ghosh to treat him as a subject,” said Sanjoy Mukherjee, film scholar.

“Ray’s many moods — his sadness, his melancholy come alive through Ghosh’s pictures. He has literally archived Ray through visuals.”