Background
Sam Bejan Tata was born on September 30, 1911, in Shanghai, China, to a wealthy, mercantile Parsi family.
Sam Bejan Tata was born on September 30, 1911, in Shanghai, China, to a wealthy, mercantile Parsi family.
Sam Bejan Tata graduated from Shanghai Public School. He studied at the University of Hong Kong in 1931-1932 and began photographing in 1936.
In his early photographs, Sam Tata became adept in the use of lighting and in the additive techniques favored by the pictorialists. His focus on portraiture in these years was partly dictated by the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1937, and Sam Tata was not able to take up photography full-time until 1946.
In 1947, through the efforts of the Indian pictorialist Jehanghir Unwalla, Tata's work was shown in Bombay. Several months later, at a show sponsored by the Bombay Art Society, Sam Tata met French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and through his influence and mentorship, was galvanized to take up photojournalism with renewed vigour. He began to contribute to Bombay periodicals such as Trend and Flashlight. With Cartier-Bresson, Sam Tata documented the Indian Independence movement from 1946-1948, including the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
In 1949, Sam Tata returned to Shanghai, where he recorded the fall of the Kuomintang and the takeover of the city by Communist troops; for a period he was accompanied by Cartier-Bresson. He remained in the city until 1952 when he moved to Hong Kong.
Sam Tata immigrated to Canada in 1956 and settled in Montreal. He quickly found work doing stills for documentary films made at the National Film Board, and he became a photo editor for The Montrealer magazine. His work appeared in publications and magazines such as Macleans, Perspectives, Chatelaine, and Time. Sometimes on assignment, but increasingly on his own initiative, he began to amass a portfolio of Canadian literary and artistic figures, including Michel Tremblay, Leonard Cohen, Michael Laucke, Irving Layton, George Bowering, Donald Sutherland, Alice Munro, and Gilles Vigneault. Sam Tata preferred to take pictures with a 35mm camera and use the available light in the homes of his subjects, where they would feel more at ease and their personalities are more fully evoked by posing amidst their personal possessions.
In 1988, a major retrospective of his life and work, The Tata Era / L’Epoque Tata was mounted by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and toured the country.
A life member of the Royal Photographic Society since 1948, he became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1975.