Artisan Camera is a testimony to an era of hands-on studio photography, when physical materials combined with the photographer’s artistry to shape the final image. This book features work from Studio Suhag in Nagda, a small town in central India. Suresh Punjabi – the studio’s proprietor and photographer – showcases some of his vintage photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. They evoke a world where the studio portrait was an important memento, capturing not just the ‘real’ subject, but also a persona made over to meet the camera’s eye. A richly argued essay by visual anthropologist Christopher Pinney – author of Camera Indica – places Punjabi’s work in the context of a visual history.
