Studio spotlight

Backdrop down: Thara Studio, Ramanathukara, Kerala, 2016

One hardly expects to see a painting at a photography exhibition. Yet, it is the first thing that meets the eye as you enter the Photoink Studio in New Delhi’s Vasant Kunj area. A large screen that looks like a half-finished painting — roads, flowers, trees, river and mountains melding into an unusual blend of blue and green — makes you stop and wonder what it’s doing there. It is, as we discover later, a painted studio backdrop.

‘Photo Studio’, an exhibition and a book by photographer Ketaki Sheth, is all about transition — her own and that of the world at large. A village photo studio “wedged in between a hardware store and a grain depot” was the inspiration, writes Sheth in her essay ‘Still Lives’, which accompanies the photographs on display. The poignancy hits home, at a time “when photography is everywhere and everyone is making images” and the photo studio is on the decline.

A year into her photo project, India’s oldest studio — Bourne & Shepherd in Kolkata — shut shop in June 2016. It was a “decisive moment” in the history of Indian photography, and symptomatic of what was happening elsewhere in the country. One remembers studios today only when one needs a passport or a bank account.

Sheth’s photographs portray studio owners as “thwarted artists”, to borrow anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney’s term. Take the studio owner who directed his own portrait. Or the photographer’s reflection caught on the glass door, stretching out of the frame as he tries to capture the stoic farmer. Or, the owner who hand-painted the backdrops in his studio, as she recounts in her TEDx presentation ‘The Journey of a Photograph’.

Seen through Sheth’s lens, the studio becomes a curious confluence of multiple stories, familiar and strange in equal measure. For the studio in her work is not one but many — from across eight states in India, and photographed over three years.

It was just like the India that Sheth has documented and photographed for over 30 years — in the throes of change.She writes, “Perhaps it was the breakdown of traditional family that I witnessed, as subject upon subject came to pose individually, exuding a new kind of photographic confidence.” And, the subjects were varied: From a self-assured seven-year-old girl to a school teen who “blushed and blushed”; from a reluctant bride’s sari peeking behind the photographer’s legs to a mannequin in a sari; from a boy in school uniform reaching for the stars painted in the backdrop to two schoolchildren playing truant; from an unadorned idol of goddess Lakshmi perched on an owl to a lonely prop of Mahatma Gandhi.

The themes speak for themselves — identity, desire, aspiration, dislocation and nostalgia. The pictures underline memory and loss, death and decay, love and friendship, art and artifice among others. “The subjects were all there: it was my job to capture that precise expression, that inner essence… I had to put the pieces of a jigsaw together to make a ‘miniature of reality’,” she says, quoting writer-filmmaker Susan Sontag.

‘Photo Studio’ also marks Sheth’s transition from film to digital; from black-and-white to colour; from the clutter of the street to the spare surroundings of the studio. It was dictated in part by necessity — the slow but sure demise of photographic films made procuring negatives a challenge. The other, perhaps more subconscious reason, was the urge to explore a new idiom of photography. “I wanted to revisit [the studio] in a selfie era, with my eye for colour. The novelty was liberating…”

The move was not an easy one. In ‘The Journey of a Photograph’, Sheth says, “I have learnt the hard way that for me most ideas don’t work; I have also learnt that a few that do are a result of very hard work.” For all the thoughts and ideas that go on before and after making a photograph, the act in itself has to be “spontaneous and fluid”. It brings with it its own rewards. The result is that her work “generates many surprises and experience teaches [her] which surprise to go with”.

Today, the digital medium itself is a challenge to the conventional understanding of an “image”. The digital image is computed, independent of the act of seeing, as Nicholas Mirzoeff, a visual culture theorist, says. In Sheth’s works, the struggle to come to terms with the nature of the digital medium is perhaps best seen in the digital image of an analogue black-and-white portrait, framed and enshrined in the colourful backdrop of the studio. It points to the paradoxes at the heart of ‘Photo Studio’ and the artist’s own photographic journey: Can the old and the new, the past and the present coexist?

Does that also mean the death of the photographer?

(‘Photo Studio’ is on view till October 13)

Aakash Chakrabarty is based in Delhi. He works with Routledge, Taylor and Francis

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