Ila Dalmia FICA Research Grant 2020 | Ranu Roychoudhuri
The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) is pleased to announce that the Ila Dalmia FICA Research Grant 2020 has been granted to researcher Ranu Roychoudhuri for her proposed project Writing Histories of Pictorialism from India.
The proposed project demonstrates the contribution of amateur photographers from late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Bengal to globally emerging technologies of photography, photoprinting, and the pictorialist aesthetic, as they joined their peers abroad in championing photography's aesthetic status on at par with fine arts. It indicates that Pictorialism in India was not an act of translation of a modular techno-social-aesthetic form developed elsewhere. On the contrary, it is a narrative of creative innovations, often devoid of cultural exceptionalism, that contributed to transcultural dialogues. It salvages the rich archive of Pictorialism to revise, complement, and complicate the existing scholarship on photography and rethink the aesthetic and cultural location of the medium vis-à-vis fine and popular art forms.
This year, the jury consisted of Latika Gupta, art historian and curator; Yashodhara Dalmia, art historian and curator and Vidya Shivadas, Director, FICA. They took note of the diversity of applications showcasing different engagements from explorations in regional literature on the arts, ethnographic studies of a variety of media and forms, personal histories, and critical perspectives on educational structures, pedagogical initiatives and the dynamics within contemporary spaces of exhibition.
The jury found the task of choosing one recipient quite challenging, and after much deliberation, they decided on Ranu Roychoudhuri's proposed project. The jury felt her research would make an important contribution to ongoing studies of pictorialism in photography in India, and that her strong background in working with archives, and her familiarity with methodology as well as scholarship in the field made her proposal a strong contender for the grant. Working with visual culture in South Asia, her engagement with the history of photography as an arena of research was evidently quite intensive.
Grounded in hitherto unstudied archives, Ranu's research fosters the co-constitution of the global and the local, and promises a fresh lens to work being undertaken in photography and its histories in the subcontinent. The range of material that she hopes to make part of the research – camera club journals, popular periodicals and magazines, catalogues of photographic salons, instruction manuals, specialized books, institutional repositories, individual/family archives, and ephemera - further underscore the historical connectedness of media practices across cultures.
We look forward to the trajectories that this project will take!
About the Recipient:
Ranu Roychoudhuri is a historian of modern and contemporary art with focus on photography, South Asian studies, postcolonial theory, popular visual culture, and intellectual history of art. She specializes in connected histories of mass circulated photographs from South Asia. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes and she is presently working on her first monograph on twentieth-century camera cultures in India. She received her academic training at Jadavpur University, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and The University of Chicago and held a research fellowship at Yale University. Previously she taught at Nalanda University and Yale University, and currently teaches at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, where she trains undergraduate and graduate students in the History of Art. Roychoudhuri is also a trained photographer and an independent curator.
Image credits (left to right):
(1) "Emechar Photographi [Amateur Photography]," Sachitra Bharat, 2:1 (1937);
(2) Arya Kumar Chowdhury, Photo-chitra, 1914, Halftone print from glass-plate negative, dimension n.a.;
(3) Arya Kumar Chowdhury, Photo-chitra, 1914, Halftone print from glass-plate negative, dimension n.a.;
(4) Mahim Chadra Thakur, Probhater Aalo [Morning Light], 1911, Halftone print from glass-plate negative, dimension n.a.