Project

Photo Studio

Ketaki Sheth

Doi: https://doi.org/10.47659/m5.072.pro

Vol. 3, no. 2
2018
April 20, 2020

Ketaki Sheth has been a photographer for 30 years. She has published four books including Photo Studio (Photoink, New Delhi, 2018), her first in colour. Her work has been exhibited both in India and overseas. She has had solo shows at The National Portrait Gallery, London (2015), The National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi (2013), Higashikawa Museum (Hokkaido, 2006) & The Emile Zola Galerie (Aix en provence, 2008) amongst others. Her other publications include, Twinspotting: Photographs of Patel Twins in Britain & India (Dewi Lewis Publishing, UK 1999), Bombay Mix (Dewi Lewis UK and Sepia NY, 2007) and A Certain Grace: The Sidi, Africans of India (Photoink, Delhi, 2013). Her works reside in major museums including Fogg Museum / Harvard, Higashikawa Museum, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum in NY. She is represented by PHOTOINK. She lives in Mumbai.

Between 2015-2018, Sheth travelled across India and visited over 65 photo studios, most of which were in a shabby state of decline. Photo studios in India have been explored by many photographers and written about extensively. Sheth’s approach to the photo studios is anything but conventional as she often ignored the strict conventions of making formal, mannered portraits of people with inscrutable expressions. Instead she used ageing studio lights when available, one handheld camera and lens to exhume tales of past glory and draw one’s attention to objects and a cast of characters that surrender gracefully to her gaze.

Photo Studio is as much a story about photography in the age of selfies as it is about contemporary life and attachments. Over the years, Sheth has shown remarkable facility as she shifts seamlessly between two distinct ways of making photographs – the posed portrait and street photography.

Prince Studio, Bhavnagar, Gujarat, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK. — *Prince Studio, Bhavnagar, Gujarat*, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK.

Victory Studio, Secunderabad, Telangana, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK. — *Victory Studio, Secunderabad, Telangana*, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK.

Sagar Digital Studio, Jaipur, Rajasthan, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK. — *Sagar Digital Studio, Jaipur, Rajasthan*, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK.

Thara Studio, Ramanathukara, Kerala, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK. — *Thara Studio, Ramanathukara, Kerala*, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK.

Phototech Studio, Calicut, Kerala, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK. — *Phototech Studio, Calicut, Kerala*, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK.

Cover photo: Sagar Digital Studio, Jaipur, Rajasthan, 2016. Photograph courtesy Ketaki Sheth/PHOTOINK.

Photo Studio is as much a story about photography in the age of selfies as it is about contemporary life and attachments.

Similar

By subject: backdrop, illusion

Interview

Keeping a Story Alive

Interview with Lukas Birk

Iza Pevec, Lukas Birk

In Myanmar, which was a completely closed country, they projected photographs of New York or Singapore or Japan onto backdrops and then people would pose like your regular 1990s young kid with a skateboard and a Sony Walkman which were both inaccessible in Myanmar.

Article

The Studio Photograph as a Conceptual Framework

Caroline Molloy

The studio portrait is no longer limited by the physical space of the studio. The digital infrastructure enables the likeness to be completed and given meaning in the computer.

Project

Background

Hrair Sarkissian

Sarkissian uses photography as a way to tell stories that are not immediately visible on the surface.

Review

Daesung Lee

Urška Savič

Lee addresses the archiving of history in museums as a practice that establishes itself as more important than the actual preservation of certain areas, people and ways of life in the present moment.

Project

Oases

Marko Stojanović

Nature doesn’t need humans, but humans, especially capitalist society, need Nature in order to establish and sustain the order they insist upon, which is based on often incomprehensible strong and inexplicable laws of nature.

Project

New Conversations around Old Photographs

BIND Collective

In this project, BIND collaborates with photo.circle to explore the relationship between memories of the locals and the city of Kathmandu.

Interview

Studio Portraiture as a Construct

Interview with Ana Peraica

Ana Peraica, Emina Djukić

While a backdrop actively participates in narration by force of visual rhetoric, the background is simply the best technical choice that serves to amplify the forefront.

Project

Love Studio

Samsul Alam Helal

Love Studio depicts the portraits of a working-class community where an old studio in Dhaka transforms into a neighborhood venue to represent the dreams, hopes and desires of the factory workers, their families and unemployed neighbors.