Material Investigations: Selected Works of Arpan Mukherjee

Arpan Mukherjee is an artist and educator working extensively with nineteenth-century photographic processes to address various contemporary socio-economic and political issues. He teaches at the Visva-Bharati University, and along with the art historian Shreya Mukherjee, has established Studio Goppo—a home for the research and practice of experimental and historical photographic practices. Mukherjee uses specific historical printing processes (like ambrotype and gum print) that in turn, speak to the thematic subjects being explored. This album features images from two series—Fairer People = Beautiful People = Powerful People and Luha Daba Chitra - Images from the Iron Box.

Fairer People = Beautiful People = Powerful People references nineteenth-century anthropological portraits of Indian people, which used iodides and bromides of silver to make warm tinted Indian skin appear black. It was a photographic technique which, in some ways, enabled the western colonisers to create a narrative of black and white separation—between white citizens and the dark-skinned subjects they colonised. In this body of work, Mukherjee created portraits of various subjects through a similar technique, but allowed agency to the sitters to modify their appearance and skin colour for the photograph. By informing them of the effects and history of this process, Mukherjee brings the contentious history of seemingly innocuous photographic chemicals and techniques into the present moment of photographic capture. Some of his subjects then used various materials including multani mitti (fuller’s earth) and skin whitening powders to make their skin appear lighter, which appear as visible layers of colour applied onto the skin.

The series Luha Daba Chitra - Images from the Iron Box was made using six custom-made pinhole cameras. The images were captured on X-ray film inside a box made out of iron sheets. The photographs are of the mining industries of Barbil in Odisha, the fifth largest iron ore repository in the world. Describing his process in his artist statement, Mukherjee says,

“I have immediately connected (to) the redness in the air of Barbil while entering the town. This very red, dusty character of Barbil lead to the idea of printing the photographs using red iron ore dust... Like iron—the primary material of human civilisation—the pinhole camera reflects the fundamentals of photography; this was the reason to document an age-old iron mining town with the rudimentary photographic process.”

All images by Arpan Mukherjee. All captions excerpted from the artist’s note.

Click on the image to view the album