Aditya Arya Archive is one of the earliest photographic archives in India, engaged in the digitizing, documentation, annotation, restoration and preservation of photographic material of archival significance in India. [1] [2] Aditya Arya Archive is led by Aditya Arya, [2] who is an eminent commercial photographer. [3]
The Aditya Arya Archive began with the historical collection of photojournalist Kulwant Roy, presented to Aditya Arya. [1] Roy (1914-1984) was among the handful of photojournalists in India who documented the eventful years immediately before and after independence. He was a close friend of the Arya family [4] and left his surviving photographic negatives and prints to Aditya Arya. These prints and negatives remained forgotten in boxes for nearly 23 years [5] after his death, until their inheritor Aditya Arya, began restoring and cataloguing them. [6] The archive included many unpublished pictures of national leaders and events of the Indian pre and post-independence era [7] and were brought to the public domain after the establishment of the Aditya Arya Archive. [8] One of the outcomes of the unearthing and restoration process of the archive was that many images from the last years of British rule and the early decades after India's independence, which were reprinted over the decades and credited to random journalists, turned out to be Roy's work and have now been duly acknowledged. One of many such images is the iconic 1939 photograph of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Ali Jinnah in a heated argument, which has now been credited to Roy by Getty Images. [6] Many historians believe that the archive may shed light on the key moments in India's independence movement. [3]
Aditya Arya Archive contains some rare and iconic images from the period of India's independence struggle and thereafter. [5] These include rare photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi and Sardar Patel huddled in an animated discussion, [7] Mahatma Gandhi in debate with Mohd. Ali Jinnah, with whom he was seldom seen with, Jacqueline Kennedy sharing a laugh with Pt. Nehru, Pt. Nehru wearing khaki shorts heading to attend a Congress Seva Dal Volunteers rally in Kanpur, [7] Pt. Nehru in cricket gear, the Indian National Army Trials, Pt. Nehru bidding farewell to his grandson Rajiv Gandhi as he leaves for a tour, [4] Congress Party meetings, Muslim League meetings, [4] Mahatma Gandhi's visit to the North West Frontier Province, signing of the Indian Constitution, Mahatma Gandhi addressing the Indian National Army soldiers, [5] the Cripps' Mission, a series documenting the development of the Bhakra Dam and photographs from the front of the Sino-Indian War, etc.
Taking a leap with the Kulwant Roy collection, the Aditya Arya Archive released a book, History in the making – The visual archives of Kulwant Roy, in April 2010. The book has been published in hardback by HarperCollins Publishers India Ltd. [5]
Aditya Arya and Indivar Kametkar worked together on the book for nearly three years, putting together text and images to form a compelling visual narrative. [5] It is a visual documentary on the history of India from the 1930s to 1950s and some of Kulwant Roy's original captions and the imprint of his own rubber stamp on several pages. [7] The forward has been written by India's Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. [5]
One of the outcomes of the process of restoration of the historical photographic collections is the India Photo Archive Foundation, which was established in the year 2009. [7] The India Photo Archive Foundation is a Public Charitable Trust engaged in digitising, annotating, and preserving photographic archives. [24]
Bipan Chandra was an Indian historian, specialising in economic and political history of modern India. An emeritus professor of modern history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, he specialized on the Indian independence movement and is considered a leading scholar on Mahatma Gandhi. He authored several books, including The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism.
Sooni Taraporevala is an Indian screenwriter, photographer, and filmmaker who is the screenwriter of Mississippi Masala, The Namesake and Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay!, all directed by Mira Nair. She also adapted Rohinton Mistry's novel Such A Long Journey and wrote the films Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, her directorial debut Little Zizou, and Yeh Ballet, a Netflix original film that she wrote and directed.
The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) is the premier art gallery under Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The main museum at Jaipur House in New Delhi was established on 29 March 1954 by the Government of India, with subsequent branches at Mumbai and Bangalore. Its collection of more than 17,000 works by 2000 plus artists includes artists such as Thomas Daniell, Raja Ravi Verma, Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher-Gil as well as foreign artists. Some of the oldest works preserved here date back to 1857. With 12,000 square meters of exhibition space, the Delhi branch is one of the world's largest modern art museums.
Raghu Rai is an Indian photographer and photojournalist. He was a protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who nominated Rai, then a young photojournalist, to join Magnum Photos in 1977.
Nandalal Bose was one of the pioneers of modern Indian art and a key figure of Contextual Modernism.
Kesava Shankar Pillai, better known as Shankar, was an Indian cartoonist. He is considered the father of political cartooning in India. He founded Shankar's Weekly, India's Punch in 1948. Shankar's Weekly also produced cartoonists like Abu Abraham, Ranga and Kutty, he closed down the magazine during the Emergency of 25 June 1975. From then on he turned to making children laugh and enjoy life.
Dayanita Singh is an Indian photographer whose primary format is the book. She has published fourteen books.
Michael Peto was an internationally recognized Hungarian-British photojournalist of the twentieth century. Emigrating to London before World War II through business, in the postwar years he became one of a generation of Hungarian artists working abroad. During the war, he worked for the British Ministry of Labour. With exiled Hungarians, he also worked to found a postwar socialist government in Hungary, but they were defeated by the Soviet Union.
Homai Vyarawalla, commonly known by her pseudonym Dalda 13, was India's first woman photojournalist. She began her career in 1938 working for the Bombay Chronicle, capturing images of daily life in the city. Vyarawalla worked for the British Information Services from the 1940s until 1970 when she retired. In 2011, she was awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award of the Republic of India. She was amongst the first women in India to join a mainstream publication when she joined The Illustrated Weekly of India. A pioneer in her field, Vyarawalla died at the age of 98. Google doodle honoured India's "First Lady of the lens" in 2017 with a tapestry of Indian life and history drawn by guest doodler Sameer Kulavoor.
Kulwant Roy was an Indian photographer. As the head of an agency named "Associated Press Photographs", he was personally responsible for several iconic images of the Indian independence movement and the early years of the Republic of India.
Pablo Bartholomew is an Indian photojournalist and an independent photographer based in New Delhi, India. He is noted for his photography, as an educator running photography workshops, and as manager of MediaWeb, a software company specialising in photo database solutions and server-based digital archiving systems.
Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator based in New Delhi, India. Her primary areas of research are around the structures of gender and iconography, media, economics and social history. She founded Critical Collective, a forum for thinking about conceptual frames within art history and practice in contemporary India.
Raman Siva Kumar, known as R. Siva Kumar, is an Indian contemporary art historian, art critic, and curator. His major research has been in the area of early Indian modernism with special focus on the Santiniketan School. He has written several important books, lectured widely on modern Indian art and contributed articles to prestigious international projects such as the Art Journal, Grove Art Online or The Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press.
The India Photo Archive Foundation is a Public Charitable Trust engaged in digitising, annotating, and preserving photographic archives. This came out as a result of Aditya Arya Archive by Aditya Arya, a photographer in India. The Foundation has been active since 2009.
Aditya Arya is a commercial and travel photographer. He began professional photography in 1980 after graduating from the History department of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University.
Abul Kalam Azad is a noted contemporary Indian photographer. Abul's photographic works are predominantly autobiographical and expose the areas of politics, culture, contemporary history, gender and eroticism. His works attempts a re-reading of contemporary Indian history – the history in which ordinary people are absent and mainly provided by beautiful images and icons. Abul's works makes an active intervention in the common illustrative discourse of this history. Using the same tool, photography, that chisels history out of a block of ‘real’ human experiences, Abul makes a parody of it. 'Overall, the corpus of Azad's work can be seen to have a thrust towards an archive of local micro-history at the level of personal memory and in that sense, his works add up to a kind of social anthropology of his land and its people, though not necessarily in the line of tradition of the objective documentary'. Abul Kalam Azad is the visionary behind EtP Ekalokam Trust for Photography, a Trust dedicated to preserving and promoting contemporary Photography. He is also the Director of Project 365, a public photo art project that collectively creates and preserves photographic visuals of the fast changing culture and lifestyle of ancient Tamilakam. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Photo Mail online magazine.
Balan Nambiar is an Indian painter, sculptor, enamellist, photographer and an academic researcher.
Marilyn Jean Stafford was a British photographer. Born and raised in the United States, she moved to Paris as a young woman, where she began working as a photojournalist. She settled in London, but travelled and worked across the world, including in Tunisia, India, and Lebanon. Her work was published in The Observer and other newspapers. Stafford also worked as a fashion photographer in Paris, where she photographed models in the streets in everyday situations, rather than in the more usual opulent surroundings.
Photography in India refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in modern-day India.
The Museo Camera is a museum in Gurugram, Haryana dedicated to the art and history of photography. Inaugurated on 28 August 2019, the museum is a joint public-private venture between Gurugram Municipal Corporation and India Photo Archive Foundation. It is conceived by noted historian, photographer, and activist, Aditya Arya. It is the largest non-profit public-funded centre for photographic arts in South Asia.