A painter with a digicam: How Jyoti Bhatt rewrote the foundations of pictures | India News

Long earlier than Photoshop, there was Jyoti Bhatt. The yr was 1971. India’s premier artwork establishment, the Lalit Kala Akademi, didn’t but recognise pictures as a fantastic artwork class. Artists who labored with the digicam have been routinely sidelined from its annual exhibitions, their prints positioned outdoors the ranks of portray, sculpture and graphic artwork. Yet Bhatt — a painter freshly returned to Gujarat after finding out graphic printmaking on the Pratt Institute within the US — was decided to interrupt that boundary.Familiar with darkroom methods resembling over-printing, masking utilizing stencils, pushing distinction, cropping and enlarging, he submitted The Face — a picture of a human head with a peacock inside it — shot with a digicam. “Instead of using the word ‘photography’, I said ‘silver gelatin print’ under medium,” recalls the 92-year-old. “The jury of experts had no idea what silver gelatin print meant and accepted my entry.”Five many years on, this iconic subversion is amongst a uncommon group of Bhatt’s experimental black-and-white silver gelatin works now on view in Mumbai. Inaugurated through the ongoing Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2026, A Painter with a Camera: Jyoti Bhatt at Subcontinent Gallery in Fort — on view until February 21, 2026 — foregrounds pictures as a central and experimental dimension of Bhatt’s follow. The title pays homage to Painters with a Camera (1968–69), the landmark group exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery that asserted pictures’s credibility when it was nonetheless largely excluded from institutional areas. The works span the Nineteen Sixties to the Nineteen Eighties, fractured via mirrors, lenses and a number of publicity, alongside collage and painted by hand photos.

Jyoti Bhatt: Jyotsna Bhatt at an Art Museum, Germany, 1978; Silver gelatin print (Copyright of Jyoti Bhatt, Courtesy of Subcontinent, Mumbai)“In many ways, he has pioneered the medium for younger generations of artists in the country. Even in his 90s, he remains deeply engaged,” says Keshav Mahendru, co-founder of Subcontinent.Born in Bhavnagar in 1934, Bhatt — painter, printmaker, photographer and educator on the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda — has been a defining determine in Indian trendy artwork because the Fifties. In 1956 he emerged as a part of the Baroda Group of Artists, joined MSU as a lecturer in 1959, and went on to check on the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples and the Pratt Institute below Fulbright and Rockefeller grants.A stressed experimenter, Bhatt’s work moved from Cubism to Pop earlier than arriving at a language formed by Indian folks and tribal types. While he labored in watercolours and oils, it was printmaking that introduced him vast recognition. By the early Nineteen Sixties, pictures entered his life — initially as documentation of India’s conventional and folks craft practices — earlier than turning into a lifelong inventive pursuit. “My camera recorded the images around me as my eyes saw them. Manipulation of photographic images, inside or outside my darkroom, shaped what was seen into what was felt,” he says.

Jyoti Bhatt: Self-Portrait, Nagda; Silver gelatin print (Copyright of Jyoti Bhatt, Courtesy of Subcontinent, Mumbai)One picture on the gallery’s social media reveals a younger Bhatt in black and white, two glasses — one perched on his brow — with a number of cameras slung round his neck. “Apart from a bird’s-eye view and a fish-eye view, there’s the photographer’s eye view,” he says. His helper as soon as discovered a Nikon lens cap left behind by photographer Kishor Parekh. “Now I have the cap. The only missing part is what’s behind the lens,” joked Bhatt to his good friend Bhupendra Karia — who quickly despatched him a Nikon digicam from overseas. “Without the cap,” Bhatt laughs, including that the glasses, publicity meters and the cameras have been all borrowed or lent equally.Bhatt’s work is held in main public collections together with the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru. “While Bhatt has long been championed for his contributions to ethnographic photography, his experimental photographic practice is yet to receive the sustained critical attention it deserves,” says Dhwani Gudka, co-founder of Subcontinent. “Jyoti Bhatt’s work as an experimental photographer is foundational yet under-exhibited and this is our attempt to help change that.”The choice grew out of “long conversations and time spent closely with the photographs themselves,” Gudka explains. When the gallerists visited Bhatt in Gujarat, they discovered him a beneficiant host — joking simply, making guests really feel immediately particular. “He surrounds himself with art — some his and Jyotsna ben’s, but mostly by friends, mentors and former students,” she says. “We were interested in his image-making process where he treats the image like a surface to think through, revise and transform.” Mahendru factors to Baroda (1983): two pictures of MSU college students fused via a number of publicity, their faces overlaid with drifting twigs and branches.For youthful artists, Bhatt’s follow is a reminder that pictures is a medium for considering, not merely capturing. Gudka highlights a 1977 triad of pictures of Jyotsna Bhatt in Baroda. “An important modern ceramist herself, it shows her as an accomplice of the artist’s experiments with the camera. The care he takes in the darkroom, the patience and rigour, is deeply inspiring.”Some works, Mahendru says, have by no means been proven earlier than. “They are also rare because they are produced as silver gelatin prints using analogue darkroom processes — exactly how Jyoti Bhatt made them originally. Showing them now allows new audiences to encounter the labour and thinking behind early photography.”At 92, Bhatt stays interested by what digital instruments can do. “I return to images made earlier and reuse them in different ways. I am also interested in play — the human mind, chess, board games, arranging and re-arranging letters, numbers and patterns. I think curiosity doesn’t belong to one time,” he says. “The tools may change, but the urge to explore remains the same.”