Image-Making-India: Visual Culture, Technology, Politics

Description

Digital technologies are a hotly debated topic in contemporary India. Image-Making-India offers insight into a country where tensions boil regarding the use of the digital as promoted by the government, and the use of the digital in creating visual arts. Favero uses examples gathered from documentary and fiction film, photography, contemporary art, theatre and design, to illustrate the extent to which the 'digital' offers an opportunity to examine the significance of images and visual culture in the creation of cultural identity in a rapidly changing India. Based on ethnographic research into image-makers in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and the author's extensive lived experience of the culture, Favero interrogates the dialogue between visual culture, technology and changing notions of political participation in India. In so doing, he examines the dialectic between digital/visual practices and everyday life. Skilfully combining a pragmatic exploration of the evolving meaning of images in a digital landscape with an overarching theoretical framework, Favero moves towards an ingenious viewpoint on cultural transformation in contemporary India. This book is a hugely useful resource for those interested in visual and digital anthropology as well as Indian and South Asian studies.

Paolo Favero is Associate Professor in Film Studies and Visual Culture at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Antwerp, Belgium.