Documenting industry: photography, aesthetics, and labor in India

Uittreksel

"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 industry-with 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 and Media 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Inhoud

Industry, documentary, aesthetics : postcolonial Indian photography in a global frame -- Through the "eye of imagination" : documentary photography and the aesthetics of (under)development -- Laboring families : photographs from sites of industry in India -- Jothi Bhatt and the folk art of photography -- "The new temples of resurgent India" : visualizing hydroelectric and nuclear power for a modern nation -- Sculpture and photography : envisioning scale in the archive of Mrinalini Mukherjee -- Bodies and machines : photographing labor on India's industrial frontier -- Dayanita Singh's machines.