Ketaki Sheth, a renowned image-maker, with four decades of dedication to a wide spectrum of themes and subjects, who is currently showing Flashback – an exhibition of black-and-white studies rewinding to the film industries of Bombay and Madras between 1985-1993 – in New Delhi, in conversation with Khalid Mohamed on her lifelong body of widely-applauded photography at home and globally.

Knowing her, as a friend and one of the frontline image-makers of India, has been a privilege. Always modest, laughing companionably and coming up with a range of subjects for her photographic adventures – searching, probing and humane – Ketaki Sheth has created a visual world, recording the marginalised as well as portraitures of eminent pioneers in their different disciplines.

I remember her starting out photographing life on the lam in the bewildering metropolis that is Mumbai. Initially, she printed these as postcards, gifted framed images – be they be of a serene landscape or the harsher reality faced by young women in Bachoo ki Wadi, a seamier section of the metropolis. The city became her canvas, helping refine her craft in the lead up to the exhibitions and published books. As Susan Sontag has written, “Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers (miscellaneous news).”
Among her significant published works count the suite of Patel Twins in the UK and Gujarat, Twinspotting (1999); Bombay Mix: Street Photographs (2007); the celebratory A Certain Grace, The Sidi: Indians of African Descent (2013); and Photo Studio (2018), a recreation of the portraits with ‘live models’ of retro-photo studios, ideated when she had come across Jagdish Photo Studio, Manori. Unlike her previous endeavours, the last was shot on digital with vibrant colours and décor.

In sync with the digital age, she got herself a Leica M9 in 2012, but for over a year continued in the black-and-white medium with her trusty Leica M6 of 25 years. The acceptance of digital and colour photography came when she travelled with the 80-year-old potter Prabhakar Jog to Ratnagiri. But the images turned out to be technically askew because of a faulty sensor in the new camera.
Be that as it may, by then she was already hooked to the immediacy of the digital medium and found herself longing for the magic of seeing images instantly, without having to fiddle with film rolls or worrying about shooting in dim light. To her, it seemed inevitable that she should return to using the M9, which she had refurbished with a new sensor.

The series with Jog was not meant to be. She returned to the streets in search of a new subject. After that, it was another six months of photographing residents of Manori island as her sitters. At that juncture, she wasn’t planning a book or a show. New to both colour and digital, she had to grasp the medium.
Next, from 2015 to 2018, Sheth located over 65 studios across eight Indian states, standing as survivors of a once popular tradition of representation. “I saw a changing India: a seven-year-old, so sure of the camera she almost breathed into it; a beautiful girl, denied a college education because her parents expected her to marry, wanted pictures of herself, not selfies; a proud man with his steel canister, unfazed that his days as a milkman were numbered; an ordinary man with his extraordinary wife who felt the need to step out of the picture for her; a girl in pink with a post, a bit hesitant at first, opened to the camera as if she was once a painter's muse; an ailing studio owner who directed the shot of himself, choosing the seat, angle and backdrop with confident ease,” Sheth writes in Open.

Aware that this new fixation of hers – colour – was well-established as a legitimate genre within photography, Sheth decided to rely solely on her intuition, leaving her imagination unhampered by knowledge of what others before her had done.

Evidently, she connects with people effortlessly and has that essential eye for detail, which, over four decades of image-making, have coached her to see visual connections and determine what is a good picture instinctively.
Currently, her exhibition of black-and-white photographs, Flashback – rewinding to the film industries of Bombay and Madras between 1985 and 1993 – is on in New Delhi. A photo book on the series has been meticulously designed and published.

As I’ve been a fan-boy of her images, I was prompted to do this interview with the ever-itinerant Ketaki Sheth over email. Excerpts:

The Genesis of Flashback

What was the germinating point for Flashback?

It was when I dug into my archives that my gallerist Devika Daulet Singh and I found thousands of negatives from my practice of over 40 years now. Amongst them was the film work. We edited the body and knew, then, that there was a book and exhibition in this.

Are there any resonances from a similar exhibition on the same subject during the last millennium at a Mumbai art gallery?

Not really. If you are referring to my very early exhibition at Piramal Gallery, NCPA, in 1991, it was a mix of street work and portraits from Bombay called Bombaywallahs. There were, perhaps, some film portraits in it as well – I can’t remember. I heard, later, that there was a fire in Piramal and all the works in their collection were lost. The visitors book had (eminent photographer and artist) Lee Friedlander and (American art historian) Max Kozloff’s comments on my show but that’s gone as well.

Our cinema – and now additionally the OTT web series – has added positively in terms of quantity but the story content and the music scores have deteriorated grossly. Aren’t you interested in chronicling the state of our popular culture and the new millennial ‘stars’ today? Wouldn’t your contemporary images be a book end to your earlier film chronicle?
I hope younger photographers catch the millennial stars and today’s scenario. I have other subjects that interest me more.

Beginnings in Photography

Do you remember the first images you ever captured in your life? And what motivated you towards photography as a vocation or raison d’être?  

My college friends have all dug up pictures I took of them! I think it was only after meeting (iconic photographer) Raghubir Singh through Sooni Taraporevala, I started taking pictures seriously and purposefully. This was in the 1980s. My early images were from Bombay’s streets. But before that, when I was in The Times of India and Imprint, I had started doing travelogues and portraits of painters and writers and personalities. I photographed Nalini Malani, Anita Desai, AK Ramanujan and even Jagjivan Ram and Haji Mastan amongst others.

But 1984 was a watershed year for me and I knew, then, that I would become a photographer. I was at New York University (NYU) for a year. On weekends, I was working at a photography bookstore on Mercer Street. Raghubir took me to meet Lee Friedlander, Bill Gedney and William Christenberry. I had the privilege of seeing them in their darkrooms and homes. Much later, when I had the dummy of Bombay Mix, I met Helen Levitt, who saw it and was excited for me.

During the 1980s-90s, what did you perceive of the filmmaking process, the technicians, the behind-the-scenes junior artistes and the spotlit actors?

I think this was soon after my return from NYU. My focus was on making good pictures. You allowed me that by introducing me to the sets, stars and crew. It was my first look at the film industry and my memories are those of endless waits, the aspirations of hopefuls, the hot days and nights with technicians working under harsh lights, the hush of admiration from all when a star said his or her lines and the director called “Cut!”

Influences and Mentorship

I am aware that Raghubir Singh has been a seminal influence on you. Any other photographers you admire – although your style and form are distinctly yours?

Raghubir was the quintessential colour photographer who knew the palette like an artist. He saw in me someone he could teach. He was in and out of NYC the year I was there.

He introduced me to great photographers and also to a floor in the Museum of Modern Art, where you could enter as a student, wear the white gloves they handed to you and, pencil in hand, write notes on all the photographs in the MoMA archives. It was like being in a library of legends. Remember, there was no internet. I was looking at original prints! I was a black-and-white photographer in the making but I think Raghubir, although a colour photographer, was excited by all the remarkable photography that was coming out at the time. Much of it was black-and-white.

I remember him talking endlessly about form and edges, light and technique, burning and dodging and the history of photography. He taught me not to be in a hurry to show but to wait till I was a more mature photographer. I am grateful for his advice.

Some years later, when I was living in the UK and had embarked upon the Twins project, he was really proud, saying it was an original and moving work. He took the hand-made dummy all over the world till he found me an UK publisher. Some months before its publication, he passed away. He left me a wonderful preface. I owe a lot to him. Twinspotting is a work I feel very close to.

Was the inevitable switch to the digital mode, something you welcomed or had to adapt to? In this context the arrival of Artificial Intelligence has set off a divided opinion –pro- and anti. Your take?

I may have been the last in my generation to move to digital. I’m slow to change. But then colour and digital photography flew through my veins. I loved the transition. Perhaps it was the ghost of Raghubir! My Photo Studio emerged from it.

While I am aware of AI, it has worked on the reverse for me. I am now back in a great darkroom working with amazing people making B&W silver gelatin prints by hand from negatives from my archive. Working with paper and chemistry still gives me a high. I am daunted by technology. (My husband) Auro calls me a Luddite.

Current and Future Projects

Street photography, tracking down born twins, making us aware of the Sidi community and the recreation of retro studio photographs, indicate your versatility. Any new project or idea under consideration?

The Sidi work has found its place in the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which has acquired a full edition of 56 works. I have two new projects I’m working on – hopefully two new books.

Since you’re a pukka Bombay person, I’m surprised that you haven’t veered towards photographing the vanishing or changing Bombay, its skyline and its people.

I am already halfway into two other projects. And I’m also working on my archives. For now, my hands are full.

There have been some works of yours – like the essay on the Bombay docks – which remain relatively unseen. Would it be possible to revive them? And there’s an image of a middle-aged woman, an obsessive autograph hunter I remember distinctly. Have you managed to digitalise all your early analogue work?

Yes, we are scanning all my work. There’s plenty on the docks, much more than an essay, from the early ‘90s and that will surely be part of a book. I don’t remember an autograph hunter though.

The stellar lifetime work of many important photographers – Gautam Rajadhyaksha, for one – has been lost to the vagaries of time or because of the indifference of legatees. Have you ensured that your work would remain forever, since photographs are all the history and memories we have?

I think Devika will ensure that as best she can. She is committed to the preservation and exploration of photography and many of us – past, present and future – will benefit from this. I am creating a temperature controlled archival space for all my work. It’s a big job in a small space.

Photography as an Art Form in India

Lastly, is photography in India, outside a minority of collectors, acknowledged unconditionally as an art form?

There’s a lot of more interest in photography now and collectors, though few, are growing. There are museums like the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (in New Delhi) which are promoting photographers and photography by acquiring collections and showing them.

I think photographers are being recognised as artists. There are also the estates of photographers from the past that are being resurrected by archivists like Devika. I think there will always be an interest in photography. It’s like a footprint that cannot be erased.   

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