Camera Indica in the New Millennium
As World Photography Day approaches, we take a look at the shifts in Indian photography over the past decade. By Sourajit Saha Christopher Pinney, in his book The Coming of Photography to India, makes a very interesting statement – ‘If nineteenth-century Indian photography’s paradigmatic location was the Himalayan foothills, in the twentieth-century photography’s preferred location […]
The Road Less Travelled
Hemant Chaturvedi, once a Bollywood cinematographer, left the industry and now concentrates full-time on his passion for documentary photography. Till now, he has documented a formidable 1045 single screen theatres across India, and continues to do so. A guy who doesn’t really ‘get bored’ of working on a project for a long time, he has […]
‘SalamKa’
A film projectionist at Pune’s NFAI for many decades, PA Salam, or ‘SalamKa’ as he is fondly known, was recently conferred the Film Heritage Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for Cinema Projection. Sourajit Saha speaks to him on behalf of ind.igenous I might have seen ‘SalamKa’ once or twice at NFAI in my few months as […]
Preserving Butterflies
Remembering P.K. Nair, the Legendary Film Archivist
Sunil Janah: Photographing a Modern Nation
The third of three articles on photographer Sunil Janah Read the previous post here Guest Author: Sourajit Saha On Nehru’s death in 1964, the New York Times referred to the first Prime Minister of India as ‘the maker of modern India’.1 Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, a central figure of India’s Independence movement, was inspired by socialist ideas […]
Sunil Janah: Photographing People
The second of three articles on photographer Sunil Janah Read the previous post here Guest Author: Sourajit Saha Ethnographic studies came hand in hand with colonialism in India. Many examples can be found in colonial art, sometimes even commissioned by the British, of the ethnographic studies of contemporary Indians in the 18th and 19th centuries. […]
Representing the Third World: Social Consciousness in the Photography of Sunil Janah
The first of three articles on photographer Sunil Janah Guest Author: Sourajit Saha Very few have photographed the country as Sunil Janah did. He was a mere college student, an active member of the Student Federation, when P.C. Joshi, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI), visited Calcutta and offered Janah, ‘Come […]
Cinema for Change: Shyam Benegal’s Rural Trilogy
‘Through my films I can say, “Here is the world, and here are the possibilities we have,”’ – perhaps it is the existence of these possibilities that made Shyam Benegal the bearer of the winds of change in Indian cinema. There were filmmakers before him working independent of mainstream cinema, experimenting with different styles of […]
The Other Lens
An account of some of the most prominent photographer characters in Indian cinema
Why don’t we talk about Salims or Naseems anymore?
Exploring Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s undisguised portrayal of Muslim communities
