Lalit Kala Contemporary Special Issue on Photography- 52 (Depth of Field Photography as Art and Practice in India)

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DEPTH OF FIELD PHOTOGRAPHY AS ART AND PRACTICE IN INDIA.

Photography within and outside India has emerged as one of the principal means of representation and creative expression in the 21st Century The volume presents the life of images from archives as well as those forged in contemporary practices, as a way of diversifying the manner in which we interpret the world around us, and how the lens creates modes of intimacy and departure. The contributions by archivists, curators and scholars are meant to reveal new practices or forms of viewing images, thereby forming sediments upon the bedrock of traditions in photography that have persisted in India for over a hundred and fifty years.

The evolution of photography has also occurred through the linked participation of viewers and practitioners. At a fundamental level, such an edition would attempt to question the photographer's subjectivity together with the camera's 'framing' of time-its ability to reveal, censor, alter and re-orient. The idea of depth of field is therefore a technical term that traces the life of the medium, not only in temporal, spatial or historical terms, but personal, self-conscious and aesthetic ways as well. Photography to this extent signifies a complex system: art-practice, visual mode, a process, a tool and hence, an absorbing, malleable means of representation.

The transformation, maturing and in-fact broadening of the field, a term used here to understand both viewers and those framed in photographs over a century, continually morphs in meaning over time, and hence this volume seeks to create an alternative Introduction to the subject.