Another Lens - (India Since the 90s) by Rahaab Allana (Hardcover)

About the Book

The book situates diverse lens-based practices within a larger orbit of South Asian visual culture.

Book Synopsis

Runner-up, 2024 Printed Book of the Year (English), Publishing Next Industry Award

Another Lens: Photography and the Emergence of Image Culture, volume 4 in the India Since the 90s series, reframes lens-based practice in India through a fresh historical perspective. The book presents a new assemblage of well-known writing and image-making. From texts by historians to recent statements/interviews by practitioners of photography, the chapters in the book come together to narrate a new story about the transformation and redefinition of photography in the 1990s - a decade marked by economic liberalization, globalization and the ascent of digital technology that revolutionized the media sphere. This compilation critically examines normative paradigms of image production, exhibition-making and circulation in the areas of documentary and fine art photography, journalism, cinema, contemporary art and the archive. It delineates new publics, emergent patterns of viewership, shifting modes of media consumption, and the diverse, technologically enabled creative trajectories that inscribe the postcolonial imaginary within the wider orbit of South Asian image cultures.

Review Quotes

The essays, though insightful and thought-provoking, often demand working knowledge of the concepts and ideas in visual culture. Nevertheless, for those prepared to engage deeply, "Another Lens" offers a rewarding experience. The diverse contributions from scholars and practitioners provide a brilliant amalgamation of lens-based practices to the creation of a modern image culture, making it an essential reading material for scholars, practitioners, photography enthusiasts as well as students of media and visual studies.--Moureen Kalita "Doing Sociology"

This volume with its diversity of time, locations and emergent lens-based practices becomes another valuable resource material for scholars, practitioners as well as students who in this day are looking at interdisciplinary methods in the media sphere.--Sohail Akbar "The Book Review"

About the Author

Rahaab Allana is Curator/Publisher, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi. A Charles Wallace grant awardee and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (UK), he received his MA in Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and was Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Visual Anthropology at University College, London. He was Founding Editor of PIX, a themed digital publication that focused on South Asian lens-based creative work, and Founder of ASAP art (Alternative South Asia Photography Art), the region's first app for presentation and discussion of contemporary visual cultural production. Allana works nationally and internationally with museums, archives, cultural initiatives/institutions, universities and arts festivals.