Publications & Monographs

Jaipur: The Last Destination

which was among the six books chosen by Christie’s first catalogue of art books under its Islamic/Oriental/Indian Section and recommended for its “stunning images.” Published by India Book House in India, St. Martin’s Press in North America and I.B. Taurus in Europe, the book also received a National award from the Indian government, and has become a landmark in Indian art book publishing by having four reprints.

Tiranga: Book on National Flag

While the Indian tricolour has been source of inspiration for Indians from all walks of life including those belonging to the creative community, there has never been a single collective body of artistic expressions dealing with this subject. Our book – Tiranga: A Celebration of the Indian Flag, now extends the same philosophy to the world of photography. Using a variety of means including a contest and invitation to some 4000 photographers, photographic bodies and educational institutions across India, this project reached out to virtually every kind of photographer in India – making it perhaps the largest ever photographic initiative dealing with the Indian flag. The enthusiastic

response from photographers, whether professional or amateur, well known or upcoming, lent depth and diversity to this initiative. Additionally, our project research team diligently looked through the visual archives of India’s leading publications as well as the collections in the various departments of Government of India for images that met the project’s editorial needs and production standards. The project team also interviewed some two hundred eminent Indians as well as others for their thoughts on the Indian flag and nationhood.

Ageless Mind and Spirit

Ageless Mind and Spirit is a path-breaking photography book. It is a product of an eight-year effort covering 400 elderly people all over India to create a series of engaging human-interest stories in the voices of the elderly themselves. Each story represents one or more facets of ageing. Together they form a picture of the way we are or will be.

Meet the man whose family once owned whole of Calcutta or the eye doctor who spent over half a century traveling across India to examine and treat some ten million people without charging a penny! Or a man continuing a 900-year old textile tradition that is now confined to only three families; the man behind India’s green revolution or the one responsible for the white revolution that took India away from shortages to world’s largest milk producer, the swashbuckling female doctor who commandeered world’s first women military regiment, or an illiterate woman who planted and nurtured hundreds of trees even though she couldn’t count them; a social worker who sorted out 70,000 disputes in remote villages and now finds his approach changing the Indian judicial system; an actor who was called in to essay the same role over and over again in films and ended up in the Guinness Book of records; the film maker who began in the silent era and is still active after eight decades!

A perfect book to light up your life and those of your loved ones.

Costumes and Textiles of Royal India

“This sumptuous volume is illustrated with a variety of material, much of which has never been published before ranging from archive photographs, miniatures, royal portraits and cinema stills, to detailed images of garments and textiles from as far back as the seventeenth century”

Phaneng

A Journey into Personal Engagement

“I first came across members of the Tai Phake tribe in the winter of 2004, while driving along the historic Stilwell road from Southwest China into India’s cloistered northeast for a documentary project. Since then, I have spent a large part of the past four years living amongst and working with members of this tribe in Phaneng, a small village in upper Assam. Due to various reasons, this tribe numbers a mere 1500 today and is on the verge of extinction.

My involvement in Phaneng has been with an education project, a monastery, and a unique eco-tourism project that has built local capacity as well as raised incomes. My proximity to the Tai Phake tribals, their trust in me, the years spent documenting various facets of their life, all this gradually led me towards this portraiture project.

The structure of the exhibition serves as a metaphoric journey through the darkening world of Phaneng’s tribal inhabitants who live without electricity, running water and most modern amenities. Ironically, they also live in close proximity to modern coal mining projects that are slowly swallowing their forests and way of life. The exhibition’s soundscape has been created with recordings from Phaneng and conveys another facet of their world. A people and a culture that may soon fade away from existence and only appear as a distant memory.”

Samar Jodha

OUTPOST

Artist Samar Singh Jodha’s latest enterprise is a visual disquisition on a global culture where individual aesthetic notions are framed by commercial interests, and homogenised to such a degree by mass media that spontaneous individual expressions often emerge as accidental bi-products of non-aesthetic pursuits.

He highlights this unusual state of affairs via a pictorial trope of discarded containers fashioned into habitat by miners in northeast India. Jodha presents an interplay of narratives represented by a broken community excavating precious minerals, and is condemned to centuries-old regression due to global technopoly that encourages rapid innovation.

Jodha summons a visual discourse rooted in documentary practice, yet is scarcely mimetic of that art form. The sliver of optimism in this work is a notion that art-making is too precious a gift to be restricted only to the virtuoso.

These works in Copper Brass & Mild Steel have been shown during the VENICE BIENNALE 2013 & at the VENICE ARCHICTURE BIENNALE 2014