Indian Photographies

"What do you men by photographic reflex ?

It’s an ‘Instant Evaluation’ based on years of seeing and experiencing while shooting. That instant when the inside and outside align and actually make one want to press the shutter. Your current state of knowledge and cumulative memory-bank, largely decides this split second capture of a visual configuration. It’s what leads to your distinct visual brew. It’s how you shoot, what you shoot. And it’s not only about what you include, but also what you deliberately choose to exclude in your final moment of release."

 

Photograph © Swapan Parekh

Interview by Mank Katyal and Marukh Budhraja | Emaho Magazine

Photographer Ketaki Sheth's new book is a heartfelt profile of the Sidis.

Photographer Adil Hasan gives a glimpse into the lives of foreign students in the 138-year-old Aligarh Muslim University in India

Photographs © Adil Hasan

"Yet it is often women who have collected and organized much of the history of photography in South Asia", Mr Gupta said.

“The family album is often guarded and looked after by the women, who are the repository of a family history,” said Mr. Gupta. “Similarly in India, I think a lot of women have worked in the industry end of photography, doing the research, maintaining archives and facilitating dialogues. The handful of photo-specific agencies and galleries that we know of in India were started by women.”

Photograph : Mohini Chandra
Article : Neha Thirani Bagri | NYT 

“I have photographed what was around me and still do. Journeys were made then and they continue even now. So, I have always recorded what was around me and intrigued me. The engagement was very simple—to look, to see, and to capture; to fill some voids that were created in the past and remain even now. In some ways it has been a form of therapy and sometimes a shield. And in our family, we lived our lives and recorded them, and if now some of it has become ‘history’ then so be it. We all make up our own language as we go along. The archive is a reservoir of this language, and it needs to undergo a constant process of re-engagement and re-assessment, in the same way that language changes and evolves over time. This is what archives are for me. They are the guardians of our memories. Calcutta is still a city that is held by time. I felt it more when I went to visit my grandmother as a child, and it still held that resonance when I went on to the sets of Shatranj Ke Khiladi . So, when I was photographing it, it was not about nostalgia as it may seem like now. Perhaps, with the passage of some more time it may become history. It is all about transitions and time—story becomes myth, myth becomes legend.”

Photograph and words by Pablo Bartholomew

"As children, most of us spent a large amount of time getting acquainted with our imagined realities. We developed grand vocabularies around these alternate places and people and narratives, and at times, even invited our friends in to explore these intimate spaces with us. I suppose in some ways I never stopped developing stories from that very place. Of course, my narratives have matured (at least I would hope so!) and are deeply influenced by my many lived experiences traversing borders, or rather, living among them. So many of us who live along these lines (either by choice or force) do go missing or disappear at times, just to re-emerge later. I am fascinated by those who — yes, dare to journey across the borders they once built for themselves. It takes courage to do so, to leave what you know in order to better understand what you don’t. “Sea Change” begins to explore the narratives around this very migration — one that is as much physical as it is psychological and/or emotional."

Work by Hajra Waheed
Interview by Rosalyn D'Mello | ArtInfo 

"For a nation that constantly references and rewrites its past, we have a shocking lack of affinity towards its documentation. As Rahman points out, all our museums are a legacy of the British need to document their conquests; prior to which, in India, it was the ruling elite or the temples that were the repositories of art or artefacts. The Indian attitude towards preservation of records is best depicted by Dayanita Singh’s 2011 photographic series File Room in which bundles of folders are piled up in tottering shelves. Fading oral traditions, given priority over written ones, have ensured there are even fewer methods of preservation open to us."

 

Photograph : Habib Rahman/Courtesy Ram Rahman. Danseuse Indrani Rahman, late 1950s, the image is now part of the New York Public Library. 

 

Text by Gyatri Jayaraman | Livemint

 

 

 

In the world of photography, Shahidul Alam needs no introduction. He started as a photographer of children, and went on to make a substantial contribution to the medium and its practice not just in his country, Bangladesh, but in the Subcontinent. He set up a photography school, Pathshala, in conjunction with the World Press Photo educational initiative. And he was instrumental in starting Asia’s very first photo festival, Chobi Mela, which attracts the world’s top professionals. In this conversation, he tells Open why the Indian photography movement lags others’, and how Bangladeshi photographers have finally quit cloning his work.

Photograph and Interview by Ronny Sen | Open Magazine

"Undeterred by his earlier experience, in 2010 Alam and his team at Drik launched Crossfire, a controversial project that exposed the actions of the Bangladesh government’s enforcement agency, the Rapid Action Battalion, who were basically given license to capture and execute their own people without due process. The photographs in Crossfire capture the locations where people have been killed, or from where they have disappeared.

“It was a national concern and we were horrified by what was happening,” Alam said. “We did this project because we had to. We thought seriously about what the modalities might be at an aesthetic level and also at a strategic level. We worked very hard at the audience engagement in terms of how we handled the media, how the news was taken out."

Photograph © Shahidul Alam
Interview by Alison Stieven-Taylor | Le Journal de la Photographie

  

 

The story of two photographers, Raghu Rai and Kishor Parekh, and their books on the birth of Bangladesh

Article : Elizabeth Kuruvilla | Open Magazine 

"The exhibition from the Clark House curatorial archive gives credence to a trajectory of art historical scholarship, from Partha Mitter to Jyotindra Jain and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, who subtly interpreted the collapse of visual iconographies of nationalism, fundamentalism, and religious pantheons. The exhibition plays with the chronologies of mediums gaining popularity in India, as put forward by writers like Girish Shahane, from the hand-painted photograph to paintings inspired by photo-journalism, and anachronistically, later by the European Renaissance. The exhibition is also a careful look at a mixture of styles within works: where hunted deer, or fighter planes stylistically differ from the pastoral landscapes that surround them. Toying with calibrations of what has been previously debated, the exhibition adds new iconographies into the fray, from lesser known contemporaries of the better known studios."

"Film director Kamal Swaroop has been involved for the last 20 years in rehabilitating the figure of Dadasaheb Phalke in diverse ingenious ways. Here, he talks to Abhay Sardesai about entering the portals of history and communing with ghosts from the past."

Interview by Abhay Sardesai | ArtIndia 

"In an economy gasping for breath, in an ecosystem reeling under consumption, waste and the ravages of war, the greed of a few threaten the future of many. We challenge you to push back the tide of unbridled growth and lay your stake to a sustainable universe. It is only by embracing the fragility of this world that we will make it your own..."

 

Text by Shahidul Alam
Photograph by Ranak Martin 

"I come from a village called kavalkinaru in tirunelveli district of tamil nadu, not very far from kanniyakumari. my father was employed at a heavy water plant in tuticorin and i spent the first 24 years of my life in the atomic energy township there. i was always told by the people in my township that nuclear energy was safe and that it was the future. I believed them..."

 

Photograph and text by Amirtharaj Stephen

 

"...Photography gives me a way to voice my protest, make my argument, present my case, and show my sensibilities to others. I had not found another way of doing this. I photograph so that I can share, articulate, debate, argument, and make a case. Photography is an extension of my self, and it allows me to create artifacts which become, as I argued in my introduction to the The Idea of India project [http://www.asimrafiqui.com/blog/], vehicles for the imagination, both human, political and civic. I am a very political individual and as a result a very political photographer. What I mean is that my personal works are always about something more than aesthetics – they are personal, and something very personal is being communicated in them. It may not be obvious what that is, but its there and I often struggle myself to articulate it, but assume that the images along with my writings will reveal it. My works have a point of view, I make specific arguments through them, and I want to communicate specific points of view..."

 

Photograph by Asim Rafiqui

Interview by Mahesh Bhat | http://writingsonphotography.wordpress.com/