This volume engages with the image of the labouring body against monumental machines, dams, and infrastructure and the ways in which photography engages with strands of modernist aesthetics to support new modes of seeing the changing industrial landscape and the human body.
Whether a smoky portrait of a coal mine or a sweeping shot of workers building an immense dam, photographs of established and emerging industries fundamentally shaped the visual culture and politics of South Asia in the decades after independence. This volume engages with the image of the labouring body against monumental machines, dams, and infrastructure and the ways in which photography engages with strands of modernist aesthetics to support new modes of seeing the changing industrial landscape and the human body.
The multidisciplinary essays in the book embrace the porosity of documentary and journalistic photography and draw out questions of aesthetics in relation to both modernizing calls to industry and modernist framings of the visual in India. The book looks back at these photographs from the twenty-first century and critically considers post-World War II industrywith its imagery of factories belching pollutants into the air and the reality of massive displacements of workers due to epidemics, floods, and drought. It analyses these images in relation to contemporaneous understandings of aesthetics and in dialogue with recent understandings of the global climate crisis. The volume probes the co-constitution of industry and photography in postcolonial India by looking at selected sites of industrial and artistic practices and their interwoven histories.
Part of the Visual Media and Histories Series, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of history of photography, visual media studies, Indian history, art history, cultural studies and South Asian studies.
List of Illustrations ix Notes on the Contributors xi Series Editors
Preface xiii 1 Industry, Documentary, Aesthetics: Postcolonial Indian
Photography in a Global Frame 1 RANU ROYCHOUDHURI AND REBECCA M. BROWN 2
Through the Eye of Imagination: Documentary Photography and the Aesthetics
of (Under)development 11 ATREYEE GUPTA 3 Laboring Families: Photographs from
Sites of Industry in India 23 SURYANANDINI NARAIN 4 Jyoti Bhatt and the Folk
Art of Photography 40 SOPHIA POWERS Color Plates 59 5 The New Temples of
Resurgent India: Visualizing Hydroelectric and Nuclear Power for a Modern
Nation 75 STUART W. LESLIE 6 Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning Scale in
the Archive of Mrinalini Mukherjee (19601980s) 98 EMILIA TERRACCIANO 7
Bodies and Machines: Photographing Labor on Indias Industrial Frontier 115
MIRCEA RAIANU 8 Dayanita Singhs Machines 135 REBECCA M. BROWN Index 158
Ranu Roychoudhuri is Associate Professor in the Performing and Visual Arts division in the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. She works on modern and contemporary art in South Asia with an emphasis on photography, intellectual histories of art, and art historiography. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and art magazines, curated shows for private and public institutions, and taught in the US and Indian higher education institutions.
Rebecca M. Brown is Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. Her research engages in the history of art, architecture, and visual culture of South Asia and its diasporas from the late eighteenth century to the present. Her publications focus on the British colonial era, Indias anti-colonial movement, art after Indias independence, the politics of display in the long 1980s, K. C. S. Panikers language of painting, and the work of Dayanita Singh, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and Rina Banerjee.
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