MOST PHOTO STUDIOS THAT CATERED TO CUSTOMERS IN A PREDIGITAL INDIA ARE ON BORROWED TIME
project they still do – under the studio lights to face the camera to museumise their memories. Few want to do so anymore. Studios with these sort of backdrops are now dead spaces or, at best, murals of a bygone era. “In my pictures I have tried to infuse the mood of a past gone by with a contemporary eye. My photographs are a residual memory of a moment once cherished, but now fast eroding in the age of the smartphone,” says the photographer. Studio owners, therefore, retire these backdrops but keep them handy just in case an oddball, with his/her head in the ’70s, should roll into town and demand a studio shoot with a ‘traditional background’ – a curtain pinched at the top of the steel rod while the rest of it unspools onto the ground. The current demand, says Sheth, is for abstract, shaded backdrops – bursts of red and pink against a black background or a seamless blue or brown.
The families that Sheth saw trooping into the studio had also shrunk. “Perhaps it was the breakdown of traditional family that I witnessed as subject upon subject came to ‘pose’ individually, exuding a new kind of photographic confidence.
“Perhaps what I saw was a changing India: a seven-year-old, so sure of the camera she almost breathed into it; the proud milkman with his steel canister unfazed that his days as a milkman are numbered; an ordinary man with an extraordinary love who felt the need to step out of the picture so that I could just shoot his wife; a couple whom I asked if I could make a portrait of them on the studio’s love-seat,” she says. What Sheth’s photos capture are evidences of pragmatism and entrepreneurship. In Ashtarag Studio, Nuagaon, Odisha, the owner is the photographer and also the painter of backdrops, for instance. Namitha Prem’s Phototec Studio, a thirdgeneration-run studio, one of the few such in Calicut, Kerala, is also doing well. “Customers say they want to be clicked in the pose they have seen a model on Pinterest. Ten years ago, the decision of how and what to shoot was all in the photo studio’s hands. If I don’t cater to them I won’t be in business,” says Prem. Now, she goes with the flow.
What Prem and Sheth also confirm is that despite the selfie, or perhaps because of it, the concept of what is public and what is private have merged. “Though some did refuse, Indians, by and large, I found were not averse to showing their face to the camera and be photographed by a stranger,” says Sheth. That privacy, too, can be a public spectacle has only grown in India. Which may not be bad news, after all, for the photo studio, the natural home for happy-family shoots. For what use is a family photo unless it begets some social media ‘loves’…. I guess.