Nanak Dhingra (13 August 1948 – 25 July 2020) photographed India’s wildlife for three decades. An engineer by training, he founded Sintech Pumps in 1986 and spent his working life designing industrial pumps; nearly everything else he spent in the forest.

He belonged to the generation that shaped Indian wildlife photography before autofocus and memory cards. His earliest surviving frames are from Ranthambhore in the mid-1990s, made on transparency film: the original Berda gang cooling off at their waterhole, the tigress who would become known as the mother of Machli, the Queen Mother among the ruins. In the years that followed he returned again and again to Corbett — the Dhikala grasslands and the Ramganga were perhaps his favourite subject — and to Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Dudhwa, Gir and the wetlands of Bharatpur, with one journey to the Masai Mara in 2011.

Elephants held a particular fascination for him. He followed Corbett’s herds for years, and his photographs of Madhuri, the elephant who caught monitor lizards and balanced them on her trunk before tossing them into the air, recorded behaviour that few had seen and fewer had managed to put on film.

His work appeared in BBC Wildlife, India Today and Sanctuary Asia, and was exhibited at the Vatavaran environment and wildlife film festival and by Project Tiger.

To a generation of younger photographers he was “Dhingra Uncle”, admired for his discipline, patience and generosity — and for his advice to shoot two hundred rolls of film before expecting anything of the two-hundred-and-first.

The archive is maintained by his son, Sahil Dhingra, and continues on Instagram at @nanakdhingraphotography.