Camera and Cosmopolitanism: Notes from South Asia

About the Speaker

Ranu Roychoudhuri is a historian of photography and art and currently working on her first monograph tentatively titled The Public Lives of Photographs: Aesthetic Conventions and Sociocultural Change in Twentieth Century India. She teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. Roychoudhuri’s area of research and teaching interests include History and Historiography of Art and Photography, Popular Visual Culture, Print History, Postcolonial Theory, Modern South Asian History, History of the British Empire, History of Ideas, Film and Media Studies, Media Archaeology, and Museum Studies.

Abstract

In the late 1970s, a photo-documentation titled People of Calcutta aimed at positive social change through imaging everyday lives of ordinary Calcuttans. These photographs responded to a postcolonial situation as much as they contributed to the intellectual history of photography in India with genealogies in the colonial and the global milieu. Weaving together the photographs and their intellectual history, this paper will chart a South Asian trajectory of “concerned photography” through the lens of People of Calcutta in the backdrop of a “virtual cosmopolis” that took shape through transcultural encounters in the print media.