Documenting Industry

'An original and expertly edited contribution to the literature on photography in postcolonial India. There is much to learn here about human and machinic labour, about new and old ways of seeing, and about the camera as both a revolutionary technology bringing new modes of perception and as a prosthetic extension of an enduring human body.'

-Christopher Pinney, author of Camera Indica and The Coming of Photography in India

'This book brings the local and the global into the same frame of analysis, but offers its own unique take through the lens of industrial photography...despite the mechanized angular images that tend to dominate the industrial photo imaginary, the volume shows how the human figure, in its form as a labouring body or otherwise, has never been very distant. It is a welcome addition that foregrounds new ways to tell the story of photography.'

-Deepali Dewan, Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada

'Extraordinary in its breadth, this volume stages riveting conversations between art historians and historians, between industry and photography and between bodies and machines in postcolonial India. It breathes fresh life into the very field of visual culture and its interdisciplinarity.'

-Parul Dave Mukherji, Professor in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

'Driven by the provocative argument that the era of industrial development in newly independent India had photography as its constitutive core, this volume of essays turns its critical lens sharply on the politics and aesthetics of industrial photography. The eclectic themes of the essays collected here throw open photography's many lives in this field as modernist art, ethnographic record, social activism and anti-developmental critique.'

-Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Honorary Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India