Documenting Industry: Photography, Aesthetics and Labor in India

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 Media and 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.

Ranu Roychoudhuri is Assistant 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 a 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, KCS Paniker’s language of painting, and the work of Dayanita Singh, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and Rina Banerjee.