Calendar

This lecture presentation intends to act as a primer to contemporary photography practices in India. With the use of eclectic and specific examples, the first part of the lecture will aim to develop a thread looking at photography in the background of modernity in post-independent India and the later economic liberalisation of the country in the 1990s. The latter part of the lecture will explore the present landscape of contemporary photography practice in the country. Often alternating between timeframes, we will be looking at how several aspects of representation, landscape, archive, community, family, identity, internet, and ecology are tackled by practitioners of photography - responding to the many peculiar contexts and constant flux within which the country resides.

Amarnath Praful is a visual artist, writer and teacher who primarily works with photography. His artistic and research practice explores elements from performance, text, video, archive and found material. His work is often guided by the landscape, folk and oral traditions, modernities, and cultural-political histories of Kerala, India. His pedagogical concerns on which he has been writing and teaching are in the area of contemporary photographic practices, representational politics, the history of photography in the subcontinent, intermedia image practices and cinema studies. Currently, he is a Faculty at the Photography Design master’s program at the National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar