Documenting Industry

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, India’s anti-colonial movement, art after India’s independence, the politics of display in the long 1980s, K. C. S. Paniker’s language of painting, and the work of Dayanita Singh, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and Rina Banerjee.

• List of Illustrations ix Notes on the Contributors xi Series Editor’s 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 (1960–1980s) 98 EMILIA TERRACCIANO 7 Bodies and Machines: Photographing Labor on India’s Industrial Frontier 115 MIRCEA RAIANU 8 Dayanita Singh’s Machines 135 REBECCA M. BROWN Index 158

‘An original and expertly edited contribution to the literature on photography in postcolonial India. There is much to learn here about human and machinic labour, about new and old ways of seeing, and about the camera as both a revolutionary technology bringing new modes of perception and as a prosthetic extension of an enduring human body.’—Christopher Pinney, author of Camera Indica and The Coming of Photography in India‘This book brings the local and the global into the same frame of analysis, but offers its own unique take through the lens of industrial photography…despite the mechanized angular images that tend to dominate the industrial photo imaginary, the volume shows how the human figure, in its form as a labouring body or otherwise, has never been very distant. It is a welcome addition that foregrounds new ways to tell the story of photography.’—Deepali Dewan, Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada‘Extraordinary in its breadth, this volume stages riveting conversations between art historians and historians, between industry and photography and between bodies and machines in postcolonial India. It breathes fresh life into the very field of visual culture and its interdisciplinarity.’—Parul Dave Mukherji, Professor in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India‘Driven by the provocative argument that the era of industrial development in newly independent India had photography as its constitutive core, this volume of essays turns its critical lens sharply on the politics and aesthetics of industrial photography. The eclectic themes of the essays collected here throw open photography's many lives in this field as modernist art, ethnographic record, social activism and anti-developmental critique.’—Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Honorary Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India