Making images once more

Mumbai produces images sooner than it could possibly bear in mind them. Images seem, flow into and vanish with little hint of how they have been made. That shift would have been unthinkable within the late nineteenth century, when photographers equivalent to Raja Deen Dayal labored with glass plates, chemical compounds and time. His pictures fastened Bombay’s streets, buildings and rulers into historical past. Photography then demanded labour, ability and materials data. Today, the picture survives, however the course of barely registers.

At a time when images exists largely in digital kind, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya continues its Historic Photographic Processes Workshop Series, which returns the medium to analogue strategies. The subsequent workshop will likely be held on January 12 and 13 on the museum’s Art Conservat-ion Department. Launched in 2019, the collection goals to reintroduce images as a fabric, scientific and cultural apply reasonably than viewing it solely as a digital output.

Why the museum started the initiative

According to Nikhil Ramesh, curator and conservator at CSMVS, the challenge grew from concern over how images’s bodily historical past was slipping from public view. “Earlier, people had prints, albums and negatives. The process of making a photograph has disappeared from everyday memory,” he says. “As a museum, we felt it was important to bring that process back into public consciousness.”

Ramesh attracts a transparent distinction between digitisation and preservation. “Scanning a photograph is not preservation. Preservation also means understanding how it was created.” That distinction issues for museums. Historic photographsendure not as a result of they have been transformed into information, however as a result of their supplies have been understood, dealt with and guarded.

The workshops permits contributors to see how photographic objects are examined and preserved.

“If you know how a photograph is made, you know how to conserve it,” Ramesh explains.

Each workshop is proscribed to round ten contributors, chosen by means of an software course of primarily based on motivation statements and pattern work. While the workshops are free, participation is curated to make sure targeted studying. Participants sometimes embody photographers, filmmakers, archivists, artists, conservators, educators and college students. The combine brings collectively modern picture apply and museum care in the identical room.

Expanding by means of collaboration

The collection started with Shantiniketan-based practitioner Arpan Mukherjee and later expanded by means of a collaboration with Mumbai-based Harkat Studios, permitting CSMVS to supply a wider vary of analogue processes and attain new audiences. “Harkat brings in a different audience from the suburbs, while the museum offers a South Mumbai space and conservation context. The collaboration benefits both,” Ramesh says. “It helps us grow the community around historic photography.”

The workshops cowl processes equivalent to salted paper printing, albumen prints, silver gelatin, cyanotype and Kallitype strategies, tracing images’s evolution throughout almost two centuries.

“There are more than 150 documented photographic processes. Yet, most people only know the digital phase,” Ramesh says. “We want artists to realise these older methods are still usable today.”

From workshops to group

Since 2019, six workshops have been accomplished, with three extra deliberate this 12 months. Participants stay linked by means of a WhatsApp group, the place they share experiments, references and work produced after the periods.

Photographer Chirodeep Choudhary, a previous participant, says the expertise reshaped his strategy to images. “Working with chemicals instead of pixels brought back the depth of photography for me. It also opened new possibilities for how I could present my work.”

Artist and educator Shekhar Sidhaye describes the workshop as a uncommon studying alternative.

“Revisiting Van Dyke Brown and Cyanotype processes after decades was deeply enriching. I now want younger design students to experience these methods.”

Photography as artefact

Photography started within the 1840s. In that quick span, its bodily practices moved from centre stage to the margins.

As CSMVS continues to increase the workshop collection, its focus stays sensible and exact. The museum needs images to retain its standing as an object that may be studied, dealt with and understood, not solely seen and shared.

The workshop will likely be carried out from January 12-14, 10.30 am, at CSMVS