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Andreas Gursky, a German visual artist known for his enormous architecture and landscape colour photographs, holds the record for the highest price paid at an auction for a single photographic image. His print 99 Cent II, Diptychon, 2001 sold for $3.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction in London in 2007.
Two years later, Bibhuti Bhattacharya, a young designer with an export house, felt he had saved up enough to buy a digital single-lens reflex camera, a professional camera. After quitting his job in March this year, he held his first solo photography exhibition in Delhi.
Bhattacharya couldn’t sell any of his works, but that isn’t stopping him from clicking. “I am not saying I want to become the best photographer in the country, but yes, I want to make a difference,” he says and, after a pregnant pause, adds that some quick cash from his exhibition wouldn’t be such a bad idea, after all. Well, he isn’t alone.
There are thousands like him in the country today who have taken up photography and dream of making it big. One can spot them lugging around heavy camera bags and waiting at street corners for the right subject and the right moment. One can also track them on social networking sites parading their work in the garb of carefully christened photo albums. Some of them show true promise. Others will go no further than Facebook or Flickr.
Says India’s best-known photographer Raghu Rai: “Most of the work that I see today is a bit wishy-washy. It is true that many more people are into photography these days and digital technology has made it easy. But the trend is still not very clear. A lot has been done in the west and we seem to be aping it.”
Rai may have a point, but in hindsight it is also very apparent that the traditional Indian art market is trying to make space for photography. From none till a couple of years ago, India now has several galleries dedicated entirely to this medium.
Wonderwall, Photoink, Tasveer and Gallery of Art and Design are some of the well-known ones. And according to their owners, the works they display are finding buyers. Says Devika Daulat Singh, owner of Photoink: “We are still a long way away from the west, but the trend here is encouraging. Compared to art, good photographs are more affordable. So, we are seeing a lot of younger buyers coming up to buy them.”
Galleries judge photographers by their history, number of solo shows and the number of international and domestic exhibitions they have been part of.
While celebrity photographers such as Raghu Rai, Dayanita Singh and Bharat Sikka are still calling the shots, lesser-known photographers, such as Agnimirh Basu and Dhruv Malhotra, are quietly but steadily chipping away at the bottom of the frame.
For instance, with a 50-year career backing him, Rai’s prints sell for around Rs 900,000 apiece. Dayanita Singh, 49, and an expert in shooting black-and-white portraits, sells her photographs for a little more.
At the other end of the spectrum, holed up in the Delhi’s ragged Govindpuri area, with his wife as model and a tiny apartment doubling up as a studio, Agnimirh Basu, with a degree in fine arts from the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Kolkata, sells his work for around Rs 20,000.
A professional photographer, Basu quit his job with a magazine a few months ago and started experimenting with photography. After managing to sell 13 photographs in the past eight months, he is a happy man. “Just after the economic recession, a lot of painters and artists have started dabbling in photography. It’s a relatively easier form of art,” he says. Most of Basu’s clients are upper middle-class people and he mentions that bargaining and bickering is a regular affair at his exhibitions.
The popularity of photography here is also reflected in camera sales. The Indian digital camera market, around two million units a year, is growing by almost 50 per cent every year, according to industry estimates. And though a tad niche, the digital single lens reflex camera market is not doing too bad either and doubling every year due to more affordable products,” says Alok Bharadwaj, senior vice-president of Canon India. “From just around 2 per cent of our total sales three years ago, it is contributing 10 per cent now.”
Camera makers are also jumping on to the bandwagon by organising regular photography workshops for enthusiasts. Canon has nearly 18,000 registered members in its community and the number is growing. “Strong word-of-mouth publicity is great for our brand image,” says an elated Bharadwaj.
But there are gaps as well. Singh of Photoink points out that a country like China has over 80 schools for photography. “India does not have a single photography school which offers a recognised degree,” she says.
Ajay Rajgarhia, 42, owner of Wonderwall takes the argument further. An investment banker, Rajgarhia took to photography three years ago. “I don’t believe in asking the government to set up schools. On the one hand, we say that we don’t want too much of government interference and, on the other, we blame it for not doing what we as a community should ideally have done,” he says.
He believes that photography, like any other form of art, will do well here irrespective of lack of professional training. “More than a form of investment, people should buy photographs and treat them as assets that can be enjoyed over a period of time. You don’t buy jewellery to sell it off the next day,” he adds.
Sikka agrees that Indians are interested. He sells his work for Rs 300,000 to Rs 400,000. “Indians have money to spend,” he emphasises.
So, should we all say cheese now?
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