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PhD supervisor: Rose Marie San Juan
Working title for PhD:听'Picturing non-alignment: Photography, nation, identity in India, c. 1950-1975'
I am a scholar of South Asian photography, postcolonial theory, third world solidarity networks and the global cold war. My thesis examines practices of modernist photography and film-making that developed in India in the early decades of its independence, specifically observing the articulation of temporality/modernity and produced in the wake of postcolonial self-assertion. I foreground the adoption of the camera against a larger network of artistic and cultural exchanges produced in the context of the nation鈥檚 early commitment to global anti-colonial interventionism, considering photography鈥檚 varied mobilisation in the contexts of nation-building, international diplomacy and in art practice as itself enacting a conclusive non-alignment. My emphasis is on photographic/filmic projects such as the exhibitions and films by the Films Division of India that attempted to articulate definitive 鈥榰niversalisms鈥� of the Indian experience; photographs taken at sites of state-led infrastructural modernism (planned modernist cities and steel towns); and experimental photomontages made by photographers at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda.听
Publications: 听
- Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present, co-authored with Nathaniel Gaskell, London: Prestel, 2019.
- 鈥淧ainters with a Camera (1968/69): In search of the Indian photography exhibition鈥�. Object 20, 2019.
Conference papers and presentations:听
- 鈥楢mputation Nation: Bodies, Cuts, Frames in the photographic production of modern India鈥�. Asian Modernisms, University College London Institute for Advanced Studies, May 2019.
- 鈥楶hotography &鈥�. Fast Forward 2: Women in Photography International Network Research Workshop at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, February 2019.
- Respondent, 鈥楢esthetics of Expropriation: Abstraction in Fazal Sheikh鈥檚 Desert Bloom鈥� presented by Zahid R. Chaudhary at Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London, December 2018.
- Panel discussant, 鈥�Painters with a Camera (1968/69): In search of the Indian photography exhibition鈥�. South Asia Early Career Researchers鈥� Workshop, University College London, June 2018.听
Media appearances/outreach work:听
- Interview with PIX magazine, 2020:
- 鈥楽outh Asian Modernists and the London Gallerist Who Championed Them鈥�, review of the exhibition South Asian Modernists, 1953-1963 at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, for Frieze (April 2018)
