Paroma Mukherjee

Paroma Mukherjee picks her favourite read of 2024

This book of drawings by India’s youngest Magnum Photos member is as close as anyone can get to the author-artist’s eye, and is an invite into how his mind sees

Choral riffs: A Wknd interview with jazz icon Asha Puthli

Her songs inspired Donna Summer; her fashion is said to have inspired Madonna's. She’s performing, after 44 years, in a tour that includes a gig at Glastonbury.

When the lens reveals excesses: Four photographers who made injustices visible

Peter Magubane, who died recently, was part of a legacy of photographers whose photographs helped uncover the suffering of people in undemocratic regimes

When a camera takes a selfie, and reveals a star

In 2022, NASA's Near Infrared Camera took its own selfie for "engineering and alignment purposes.” Will the wonders of this space explorer never cease?

Profile|The perfect pitch for love and loss

Brooklyn-based Arooj Aftab became the first Pakistani singer-songwriter to win a Grammy in 2022. We catch her in the middle of a Europe and North America tour

My obsession with music was ‘not normal’, says Pakistan’s first Grammy winner

For Arooj Aftab, heartbreak and grief only make music richer. And it’s touched hearts across the border and in the world beyond. HighlightsIn 2003, before YouTube or social media, an 18-year-old Arooj Aftab recorded a light-jazz version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. It was shared heavily on email, Napster and LimeWire, becoming one of the first songs to go viral in Lahore. She famously played, impromptu, in a hotel room, with the Pakistani Sufi legend Abida Parveen in New York City, in 2010. The two women were scheduled to perform, separately, at the Sufi Music Festival there when Aftab made a dash for Parveen’s room and ended up playing the harmonium alongside her. “She was extremely generous, kind and open-hearted. You don’t expect famous people to be like that. But she was, and it was incredible,” Aftab says. Aftab has written the original score for a videogame too, co-composing a 30-track doom-jazz soundtrack for Backbone, which she describes as a “noir, pixel-art raccoon detective adventure game”. The game was released by EggNut in 2021. Highlights

Paroma Mukherjee picks her favourite read of 2022

10 lens-based artists and photographers from South Asia begin a conversation through their works in this volume

Ketaki Sheth brings the photo studio to the gallery

The photograph as a digital document has made a comeback like never before, not leaving far behind the performative power of the self-portrait and its transition to the “selfie

Pride Matters | Queering the lens

Dayanita Singh and Sunil Gupta’s books foregrounded the queer community’s representation in photography in India

50 yrs of ‘Napalm Girl’: People of colour and the lack of consent in photography

People of colour continue to face a serious imbalance of power and agency on the other side of the lens in photography

Lens cart: A look at the hottest new self-published photobooks

Conflicts and cultures, the public and the personal... as more photographers self-publish their work as precise, immersive volumes, a guide to the best ones to flip through, or read at leisure.

Paroma Mukherjee, Head, National Photography Desk, picks her favourite read of 2021

A spectacular visual atlas of Mars’ surface from pictures taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using the HiRISE camera that has been beaming back high resolution imagery for over 15 years

Home is where the light is

Dayanita Singh’s new book pays homage to architecture and photographic portraiture through conversations with BV Doshi

Danish Siddiqui’s work mirrored society’s uncomfortable truths

Killed while on assignment in Afghanistan, Pulitzer-awardee Danish Siddiqui photographed unforgettable scenes from the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh, the CAA protests and the riots in Delhi, and India’s Covid-19 crisis

Paroma Mukherjee, Head, National Photography Desk, picks her favourite read of 2020

Relaying difficult social experiences

Review: Centralia by Poulomi Basu

Truth is stranger than fiction in this photo book, or perhaps it’s one and the same, as photographs become shape shifters in the jungles of central India, the scene of several conflicts

Mahatma in a single frame

Gandhi realised the power of photography early on, for he used it strategically during India’s freedom movement later.

How photography went beyond the call of duty on the Moon

Over the decades, Nasa released all images from its Apollo missions to the public for free, democratising the medium even further, as the images lay bare open to scrutiny and research

The grim aftershock of powerful photographs

We must remember the reason behind the image, for that should haunt us until there is real change for the better

Barrack at Red Fort, Delhi, to host rare artworks

The Red Fort barracks, reminiscent of the Mutiny, have undergone a makeover.

Chronicles of loss: ‘Farm widows’ tell a story of bleak survival

A black and white photo exhibition of Vijay Jodha’s stark, telling portraits of ‘farm widows’ in New Delhi could not have been better timed. Just this week, thousands of farmers marched 200 kms to Mumbai to push for theirs demands, including loan waivers from the government.

Stuart Freedman’s exhibition of photographs captures life inside Indian Coffee Houses

Freedman first came to India on work in 1994 and on his first visit to the coffee house, he was reminded of old English cafes and their post-war austerity.

On exhibit in Delhi: Prabuddha Dasgupta’s and Dileep Prakash’s intimate portraits of nature

At PHOTOINK, New Delhi, the late Prabuddha Dasgupta’s ‘Anatomies’ and Dileep Prakash’s ‘Sleeping in the Forest’ are on display together as two solo exhibits.

Exhibition: Wildlife photographer Aditya Singh captures forests of India, East Africa

Wildlife conservationist and photographer Aditya “Dicky” Singh latest exhibition brings to Delhi fine moments from forests in two countries

Sooni Taraporevala’s photo exhibition reveals a heartwarming visual sojourn of Mumbai

The exhibition, Home in the City: Bombay 1977 to Mumbai 2017, is currently on in Delhi

To Indira, With Love: An exhibition of the former Prime Minister’s intimate, unseen photographs

A photographic exhibition brings to the public for the first time, rare photographs of Indira Gandhi

A life in observation: Spanish photographer José Suárez’s retrospective opens in Delhi

Known to his family and friends as Pepe, Suárez’s photographic vision was unique and humanist, with a deep interest in the anthropology of his times.

In Pics: Sooni Taraporevala brings Bombay back to Mumbai

In Pics: Karan Kapoor’s portraits of Anglo-Indians from 1980s India

In ‘Time and Tide,’ at Bikaner House, New Delhi, former actor Karan Kapoor brings together two bodies of work to mark the lives of Anglo-Indians in the 1980s