Book design of Convergence: A Panorama of Photography's French Connections in India. Design: Ishan Khosla Design LLP. Commissioned by Institut Français en Inde. Produced by Rahaab Allana, Alkazi Foundation. Printed and Bound by Naveen Printers.
The cover with the slipcase shows works of French image makers but when you take out the book you also see Indian picture takers—a metaphor of the convergence between the two.
From the curator:
Organised in the framework of the fourth edition of Bonjour India, a pan India festival for the arts, the 75th anniversary of Independence and the 195th anniversary of the birth of photography – the exhibition Convergence: A Panorama of Photography’s French Connections in India presents works by prominent French practitioners, signposting some of the significant photo-documentary and other creative practices that developed in India over the last 150 years.
The exhibition showcases rare works from renowned French museums including, the Fonds Marc Riboud / Musée National des Arts Asiatiques – Guimet (Paris), Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (Paris), Musée Nicéphore Niépce (Chalon-sur-Saône), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris) and Musée Goupil (Bordeaux) for the very first alongside select contributions from important early Indian practitioners from the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, City Palace, Jaipur and the Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi.
Produced by intrepid travellers, writers, journalists, photographers and artists, the exhibits span the colonial, modern and postcolonial periods of subcontinental history from the mid-nineteenth-century to the 1970s. The exhibition features works of notable French photographers over broad spans of time, such as Louis-Théophile Marie Rousselet, a French traveller in India during the 1860s who met India’s first photographer king, Sawai Ram Singh II in Jaipur, Marc Riboud a celebrated French photojournalist who worked for Paris-based Magnum Photos from 1953-78 and travelled all around Asia in the 50s along with the works of many other modern European masters such as Denis Brihat, Paul Almasy, Edward Miller and Bernard Pierre Wolff among others.
The originals works were on display at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (28 April – 30 June 2022). The 6-cities outdoor manifestation of the show comprising reproductions of these works were showcased at the Amdavad ni Gufa, Ahmedabad (24 March – 2 April 20220), Bangalore International Centre, Bengaluru (12 – 23 April 2022), Government Museum, Egmore, Chennai (11 – 23 May 2022) and Indian Museum, Kolkata (15 November – 7 December 2022).
