See, Shoot, Self Publish: How self published photobooks are on the rise in India
A growing number of Indian photographers are self-publishing photo books, even though it’s expensive to self publish, especially without a
A growing number of Indian photographers are self-publishing photo books, even though it’s expensive to self publish, especially without a book grant. Photographers prefer this model because of the creative and editorial freedom it offers. Photographers and visual artists also publish under their own imprints, such as Ugly Dog by Sohrab Hura, Editions JOJO by Kaamna Patel and Red Turtle by Soumya Sankar Bose. For the reader, photobooks now range from documentary, docu-fiction and explorations of culture to autobiographical, conceptual work that may employ personal archives and family albums as part of the narrative.
Magnum photographer Sohrab Hura’s book, The Coast, is an iteration of his long term project and his short film, The Lost Head & the Bird. Both film and book are set along the coasts of India, unveiling undercurrents of violence that is religious, caste-based and sexual. The book (like the video) is an editing masterpiece that uses found images and Hura’s own photographs to tell a story in 12 iterations.(Sohrab Hura)
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The images switch between being brutal, funny, dark and silly and all together at once. Sohrab Hura designs and edits his books himself. “The work was made over seven years and is like Chinese whispers—each time we narrate, something changes. It’s like narrative is the new warfare,” he says.(Sohrab Hura)
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Between 2007-2008, on a Nokia 6600 phone that his brother gave him, Sanjeev Saith made some photographs of his ailing parents, for whom he was a fulltime caregiver. “It was actually over two nights and two days in that period, that the photographs in the book Happy Goodnight came to be,” he says.(Sanjeev Saith)
Happy Goodnight, Sanjeev Saith’s photobook, is self published, and the book is pocket-sized, opening into an accordion fold that reveals the monotony of a caregiver’s routine in a manner of no beginning or end.(Courtesy Sanjeev Saith)
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Handmade, hand stitched and bearing an open spine, Kaamna Patel’s limited-edition photobook, In Today’s News: Alpha Males and Women Power, appropriates images from the print media to offer striking commentary on predetermined gender roles and patriarchy.(Kaamna Patel)
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Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
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Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
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Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
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At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
