IN A NEWLY CONSUMERIST INDIA, DINODIA CAPTURED EVERY PREOCCUPATION, FROM PUGS AND POMERANIANS TO BUBBLEGUMPINK STRAWBERRY ICECREAM
It helps that Agarwal is a photographer himself. He shot his first pictures with an Agfa box camera nearly 50 years ago and, by 1969, had signed up for a course — via post — at the New York School of Photography. It was slow but valuable learning. “Few photographers here were formally trained; it gave my work a sense of design.”
Agarwal travelled across India with photo and nature groups, contributing to local publications. But it would be 20 years before he would quit the family textile business to apply that sense of design to others’ pictures too. Photo agencies in the 1980s were small enterprises, selling personal collections or unused stock.
Vispy Doctor, a long-time advertising executive who runs a branding consultancy, says Dinodia almost started in Doctor’s Tardeo home. “We were both photographers and friends and I suggested he start a photo agency, offering my living room as office space,” Doctor says. “In retrospect, I’m glad he didn’t.” Agarwal, he says, looks at photos as much for the aesthetic value as their commercial viability. “I’d only have stood in his way.”
Agarwal set up shop in Kalbadevi in 1987, giving up photography so contributing photographers wouldn’t accuse him of promoting his own work. Business boomed. “There’d be 20 to 30 people and a fridge full of cold drinks in the reception,” he recalls. Advertising clients would visit from Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Germany, London and New York, select a few dozen images and fly out by the evening.
Dinodia’s timing was perfect. Five years in, economic liberalisation had ushered in new businesses, new money and a newly consumerist urban India, and Agarwal’s photographers captured our every preoccupation, from pugs and pomeranians to bubblegum-pink strawberry ice-cream. Colour photos documented a film industry on the brink of Westernising as satellite TV changed the visual language of India.
Dinodia pictures have sold for up to Rs 8 lakh each; one featuring a turbaned man on a laptop in Rajasthan, has sold 40 times.
Varanasi-born filmmaker and artist Ravi Shekhar moved to Mumbai in 1989 and submitted some 30,000 images to Dinodia from 1991 to 2011. The agency helped photographers like him, he says. “Selling photos is impossible when you spend your time shooting,” Shekhar explains. “And artists are bad businessmen – but Jagdish was pure business. He’d look at every slide, dispassionately throwing away the ones he didn’t like – we started to keep a waste paper basket near him at selection time.” The Dinodia association wasn’t lucrative, Shekhar admits. But it offered enough stability to give him creative freedom.
Today, Dinodia operates from swanky Nariman Point, the library is digitised and searchable online. But Agarwal’s curation process is the same: images should stand out for their subject, technical brilliance, balance of timeliness and timelessness and their ability to tell several stories to attract multiple buyers. “They should look good in thumbnails, exactly how a customer will first see them,” Shekhar says.
But the game has changed. “The fun has gone,” Agarwal says. “People surf the site, they don’t call for help.” New tech encourages trigger-happy shooting. “With film, we’d load a roll in the morning and knew we’d get only 36 pictures. It forced one to think before one clicked,” he says.
In addition, private collections are going online and museums and institutions like NASA are opening up their image libraries for free. Journalist and rural-affairs campaigner P Sainath, who set up the People’s Archive of Rural India to document life in villages, says archives are necessary in a fast-changing world. “A library like Dinodia’s is extremely useful for the media.”
Agarwal sees it too, but ever the businessman, he knows that a stock photo has no value if it doesn’t sell. Shekhar recalls that Agarwal’s father once told his son he wouldn’t make good money in the photo business.
“He took it as a challenge and sold enough of other people’s pictures to match a businessman’s lifestyle,” Shekhar says. “He has the most focused approach to the business of photography.”