Camera Indica

Picture a newlywed pair staring straight out of a butterfly's wings, or a memorial portrait of a dead boy ringed with rose petals. Christopher Pinney, an anthropologist, uses images like these to examine how photography has functioned in Indian life, and his study, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, follows that work across roughly the last century, through both the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Pinney highlights three major phases in Indian portraiture. Under British rule, the camera was treated as a tool for measuring people. Later, portraits were used to teach moral lessons. Most recently, the look of popular culture has shaped how people choose to be pictured. In this account, photography is less about faithful resemblance than about a shifting set of aims. Contemporary studio work relies on overpainting, collage, composite printing and doubling, along with painted backdrops and props such as motorcycles, letting sitters build an open-ended range of identities instead of simply documenting them.

The book includes 127 photographs. Pinney follows the move from depicting a subject to inventing one, and his close reading ties each image to the society that produced it.