Rahaab Allana will give a guest lecture in ARTH 4690: Comparative Modernities [Prof. Iftikhar Dadi] and discuss his edited volume, Another Lens: Photography and the Emergence of Image Culture, at 2:00 PM in the History of Art Gallery.
Another Lens: Photography and the Emergence of Image Culture reframes lens-based practice in India through a new assemblage of well-known writing and image-making. From texts by historians to recent statements/interviews by practitioners of photography, the chapters in the book narrate the transformation and redefinition of photography in the 1990s – a decade marked by economic liberalization, globalization and the ascent of digital technology that revolutionized the media sphere. This compilation critically examines normative paradigms of image production, exhibition-making and circulation in the areas of documentary and fine art photography, journalism, cinema, contemporary art and the archive. It delineates new publics, emergent patterns of viewership, shifting modes of media consumption, and the diverse, technologically enabled creative trajectories that inscribe the postcolonial imaginary within the wider orbit of South Asian image cultures.
Speaker Biography
Rahaab Allana is Curator/Publisher, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi. A Charles Wallace grant awardee and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (UK), he received his MA in Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and was Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Visual Anthropology at University College, London. He was Founding Editor of PIX, a themed digital publication that focused on South Asian lens-based creative work, and Founder of ASAP | art (Alternative South Asia Photography | Art), the region’s first app for presentation and discussion of contemporary visual cultural production. Allana works nationally and internationally with museums, archives, cultural initiatives/institutions, universities and arts festivals.
