Jan 16 2023 to Jan 16 2023 6 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Book/Buy

Where

Museum of Art & Photography (MAP)

Kasturba Road, Bengaluru 560001

Special Instructions

Age appropriate: 18+

Event Description

In the Spring of 1938, dancer Ram Gopal, a native of Bengaluru, and American photographer Carl Van Vechten came together for a photoshoot in New York City.

The large cache of images that were produced is considered the earliest visual record of the dancer. However, the record is complicated: on close observation, the images show an uneven negotiation between the widely separated worlds of the Indian dancer and the American photographer. Prof. Ajay Sinha’s book, Photo-Attractions: An Indian dancer, an American photographer, and a German Camera (Newark, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2023), describes the interpersonal desires and expectations of the two men that took shape when the dancer took pose in front of Van Vechten’s Leica camera.

The hitherto unpublished images capture a unique interaction between the visual and the performing arts, in which the ‘classical’ emerges as a modern, transcultural value revealed in the dancer’s body through photography. Speaking from his book, Prof. Sinha illustrates the ways in which this rare and compelling record of an underrepresented history of transcultural exchanges during the interwar years of early 20th century, can raise questions of technology, performance, colonialism, race, desire and more.

Author: Ajay Sinha.

Ajay Sinha is the Julie ‘73 and Helene ‘49 Herzig Professor in the Art History and Architectural Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College in the U.S.A. He teaches a wide range of courses on the visual histories of global modernity and the arts in Asia, including architecture, photography and film. His publications include Imagining Architecture: Creativity in the Religious Monuments of India and the co-edited collection Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens.