Another Lens: Photography and the Emergence of Image Culture

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.

Rahaab Allana is curator/publisher, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi. He is the founding editor of PIX, and Founder of ASAPArt (Alternative South Asia Photography/Art). He works nationally and internationally with museums, archives, cultural initiatives and institutions, universities and festivals. He edited and published Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia (2023).