Room 207, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus, Ahmedabad University
At a time when AI is thought to have posed a crisis to the practice of photography, this talk will look into the ways in which 19th-century photographic processes have come to acquire a central position in contemporary art. It will walk the audience through the artist's own works to think about what hand-crafted photographs do to photography's ontology and the medium's objecthood.
Professor Arpan Mukherjee is an interdisciplinary artist and a pioneer in reviving historical photographic processes as an integral part of contemporary practices. For the last two decades, he has extensively researched and documented 19th-century methods and materials to explore the possibilities of ‘alternative photography’, developing mediums like gum dichromate, salt print, wet plate collodion, homemade silver gelatin emulation, etc., according to Indian climatic conditions. Using his research, documentation and experimentation as a tool for his artistic expression, Professor Mukherjee pushes the limits of contemporary photography. He has participated in several international and national exhibitions, delivered lectures and conducted workshops on photographic printmaking and its histories. Most recently, in 2023, he researched and made modern albumen and salt print copies of 19th-century archaeological photographs in collaboration with the British Library and CSMVS, Mumbai. He is also the co-founder of Studio Goppo, a photography research studio in Santiniketan.
