Jagdish Photo Studio, Manori, Maharashtra, 2015
Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK
Prince Studio, Bhavnagar, Gujarat, 2016
Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK
Thara Studio, Ramanathukara, Kerala, 2016
Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK
Krishna Digital Photo Studio, Jaipur, Rajasthan, 2016
Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK
Studio Kamal, Cuttack, Orissa, 2016
Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK
Babas Studio, Trivandrum, Kerala, 2016
Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK
Photo Studio was a journey through eight states of India. I saw a changing India: a seven-year-old, so sure of the camera she almost breathed into it; a beautiful girl, denied a college education because her parents expected her to marry, wanted pictures of herself, not selfies; the proud man with his steel canister unfazed that his days as a milkman are numbered; an ordinary man with his extraordinary wife who felt the need to step out of the picture for her; a girl in pink with a posy, a bit hesitant at first, opened to the camera as if she was once a painter’s muse; an ailing studio owner who directed the shot of himself, choosing the seat, angle and backdrop with confident ease. 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. It was also a time of reflection: looking at glass negatives of anonymous people in Mumbai's historic Vanguard Studio or, in Darjeeling's Das Studio, at a 90-year-old glass plate of the world's highest mountain held by a studio assistant born in the time of digital.
The studio as a subject has attracted much attention through the years and across cultures. But this did not deter me. I wanted to revisit it in the selfie era, with my fresh eye for color. The novelty was liberating - just one camera, one lens, no tripod, few memory cards, using the studio's rickety lights, something I probably could not do as easily with film. There were endless ways of looking, the possibilities, infinite. Quite simply, the idea was to do it differently. I needed to find a touch of pathos, some nostalgia and a bit of humor too.
Most studios I visited were in decline, but there were some that were busy. And that is how I encountered my subjects - a Rajasthani farmer in need of a photo for his land documents; three teachers who came out of curiosity, arranged themselves like a film poster and asked to see the image on my camera before saying 'yes'; a bride in Cuttack at her favorite studio to have her portrait done; a pair of unhappy twins in Calicut who had come in for happy birthday pictures; in Trivandrum, a couple in love, in for passport pictures who obliged me by posing on the studio's love seat; two best friends in a village in Kerala playing truant from school, cooling their heels against the snowy landscape behind them.
The subjects were all there: it was my job to capture that "precise expression," that inner essence - that unexpected moment, that sliver of light, that decayed crease in a curtain, that "object of rueful feelings" (Susan Sontag, On Photography). I had to put the pieces of a jigsaw together, to make a "miniature of reality" (Sontag). For instance, the farmer’s bewilderment that I should want to take his picture using a mirror door; the hint of the bride's sari hidden between the studio photographer's feet; the natural oomph of the seven-year-old precocious girl; the nostalgic silence of a tiny iconic relic in a deserted Hyderabad studio; the cut-out of Gandhi, a prop that hadn't seen the light of day in years; a sari hung out to dry by a studio's cleaning lady; a giant mannequin that had stepped into toy town; the blue stool against a cascading red backdrop that flagged me off into this journey. Occasionally, the pure indulgence of being able to use studio lights to create a full moon in a night sky or to improvise an old tripod to be the trunk of a painted flowering tree.
Photo Studio came to me at a time when photography is everywhere and everyone is making images. The photographer has to toil to get it right. As Robert Adams said in his book Why People Photograph, the task of the photographer is "to affirm life without lying about it."
[Excerpted from the essay "Still Lives" by Ketaki Sheth, from her book PHOTO STUDIO, published by PHOTOINK, New Delhi, 2018.]
20 November
