While working at the shoe factory Kally supplemented his income by photographing social events for The Leader newspaper on weekends. “I remember doing my first enlargement in a makeshift darkroom in Plowright Lane, not far from the leader offices in Pine Street, (Durban). We got under way at 8pm and at 4am we were cursing as the sun began rising, jeopardising our print…In the early days we had to envisage a whole host of diverse criteria before pressing the shutter. But modern photography has taken the ‘sting’ out of photography…”

In 1952, Kally won third prize in an international competition held in Japan out of a field of 150 000 entries. He quit work at the shoe factory to join Golden City Post and Drum, whom he worked for from 1956 - 1965 and again from 1968 – 1985. It was in these years that Kally produced some of his most brilliant and insightful pictures working alongside the famous Drum bureau-chief for Durban, the late G.R. Naidoo. These years saw him photograph the likes of Monty Naicker and former President Nelson Mandela at the Treason Trial, the mixed glamour couple of the fifties: Miriam Makeba and Sonny Pillay, Oliver Tambo in Lesotho, Alan Paton and Sushila Ghandi in a quite moment together, Chief Albert Luthuli under house arrest and Luthuli receiving news on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. He also managed to capture some Durban’s most notorious gangsters from the Crimson League and Salot gangs.

In 1967 Kally was selected for membership to the Royal Photographic Society, London. His work has been included in exhibitions such as In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (curated by Okwui Enwezor, Octavia Zaya et al. - Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996), Margins to Mainstream: Lost South African Photographers (shown at the Grahamstown Festival in 1994 and the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham, England, 1995) and in numerous books and catalogues viz. Sof’town Blues (1994), From Canefields to Freedom: A documentary on Indian South African Life (2000) and Fatima Meer’s Portrait of Indian South Africans (1969) to name but a few.

While the exhibition features many of Kally’s images of the fifties along with photos of that famous jazz club, the Goodwill Lounge in Grey Street, Durban, owned by the colourful “Pumpy” Naidoo, these are contrasted by the sensitive private black and white portraits of life in, Tin Town, the Indian shanty town (formerly on the banks on the Umgeni River, Durban) and the spiritual calmness of early morning bathers along the river Ganges in Varanasi, India.

The two pictures that were selected for the Guggenheim show of ’96, that both challenge the racial stereotypes of the fifties are also on view. The one depicts two older working class white men drinking in a Cator Manor shebeen while the other immortalises former stunt motor cycle rider Tommy Pillay and his wife, riding the “Wall of Death”. The exhibition looks at the highlights of Kally’s work and spans a period of roughly forty years. Kally has the uncanny ability of capturing people, famous or anonymous, in their most relaxed moments making the photographer himself invisible, and in so doing is able to capture the most humane inner emotive portraits.

While Kally’s works have been caught by the occasional international curator and included in the odd show his first solo exhibition in a career spanning 58 years was held at The Goodman Gallery in 2004. The show was initiated and curated by artist/curator Riason Naidoo who has been working with Kally over the last 6 years. A neglected photographer denied exposure by living in the wrong place in the wrong era this exhibition attempted to redress that. Kally currently works as a freelance photographer in Durban.