Logo

0
Your cart is empty empty bag

Free Worldwide Delivery on orders over $50

Х

Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose

 
Shan Bhattacharya (Author) Gargi Bhattacharya (Translator)
Synopsis

Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose, conceptualized, compiled and reproduced by Shan Bhattacharya, recipient of the Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography, 2015 (instituted by the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation), presents the personal diary of the owner of a small photography studio in Calcutta, India, maintained sporadically from 1994 to 1996, before his sudden unexplained disappearance. The diary is a fictional ‘found archive’ that contains his collection of photographic prints, letters, torn pages from books, newspaper and magazine cuttings, declassified police records, polaroids and print advertisements obtained from different sources. Through these documents spanning the twentieth century, he attempts to trace photographic ‘evidence’ and information about an elusive woman who seemingly does not age through a century. Mr Bose’s search is also a journey through the local history of vernacular photography and regional publications that reflect popular culture, politics, fashion, design, advertising and other iconography, and their transformations over time. 
In this book, images serve both as the primary objects of interest and a narrative device. The cover plot interrogates the veracity of photographs – the way they are used as indices and evidence of a person’s existence in spatio-temporal reality. These images are staged in variously contrived scenarios, often taking cues from the several utilitarian subsets of twentieth-century photography–the wedding portrait, the convocation photo, the vacation/holiday photo, candid snapshots, product advertisements–as though taken by different fictional photographers using different image-making aesthetics, techniques and formats appropriate to the time/place/visual cultures that those prototypes historically belong to. Referring to the genre of historiographic metafiction, fictional text and visual elements based on real events and characters are introduced to enable this ‘found archive’ assume certain characteristics of a hoax.

Read more
110.70 99.63 $ 123.00 $
Free delivery Wolrdwidе in 10-18 days Ships in 1-2 days from New Delhi Membership for 1 Year $35.00
Get it now and save 10%
Members SAVE 10% every day
BECOME A MEMBER
Write a review
Reviews in total
 

Bibliographic information

Title Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose
Format Hardcover
Date published: 30.12.2020
Edition 1st ed.
Publisher Tulika Books
Language: English
isbn 9788194534808
length 102p., Illustrations., (Black and White, and Colour); 27cm + 1 Booklet (8 Unnumbered Pages; 24cm.