The Caravan – August 2019

(coco) #1
10 THE CARAVAN

/ shruti janardhan

On the afternoon of 29 November, when I visited
Jaykumar Shankar’s small office in Delhi’s Patel
Nagar, his desk was strewn with hand-painted
photographs and bottles of transparent photo
colours. The photographs were for his upcoming
exhibition with Vasantha Yogananthan, a photog-
rapher based in Paris who describes his work as
“photographic practice that addresses the space
between documentary and fiction.” The two began

their collaboration in 2016, and Yogananthan’s
work, A Myth of Two Souls—to which Shankar
contributed—was released the following year.
Shankar flipped through some of the hundreds
of black-and-white photographs that he has
painstakingly coloured by hand. “If someone who
is not used to transparent photo colour uses it on
the photograph, it will take only one dab for the
photograph to be ruined,” he told me. “It is tricky
to use this colour if you can’t do it with finesse, be-
cause otherwise the photograph will get spotted,
and then it takes you additional time to clean it
before you start again.”
He described the headspace with which he
starts hand-painting a photograph. The entire
process is guided by the intuition and sensitiv-
ity of the hand-painter, he said. “It is all in the
imagination.” Once he has an idea of where he
wants to take a particular composition, he cleans
the black-and-white print by applying a particular
chemical. The photo is then kept in the dark, to
protect it from exposure to sunlight. The next step
is to apply the photo colours, the amount of which
is determined by the relative distance of objects
in the photograph. Finally, it is left to dry. The
entire process can take days at a stretch, depend-
ing on the picture. Shankar uses a colour palette
suggested by Yogananthan for the projects they
collaborate on.
Hand-painting photographs was a popular
practice in the West during the nineteenth cen-
tury. The art arrived in India around the same
time as photography itself. Deepali Dewan, an
art professor at the University of Toronto, argues
in her book Embelished Reality: Indian Painted
Photographs: Towards a Transcultural History of
Photography, that “the desire to manipulate the
photographic image stemmed from what was
perceived as the limitations of photography’s
technical capabilities.” The first generation of
Indian hand-painters were court painters, who
had, prior to the advent of photography, faithfully
recorded minute details of prominent royal events,
including subtle variations in costume. Even

THE LEDE


Camera Obscura
The dying art of hand-painting photographs
/ Arts

courtesy vasantha yogananthan

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