Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose, conceptualized,
compiled and reproduced by Shan Bhattacharya, recipient of the
Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography, 2015 (instituted by the
Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation), presents the personal diary of
the owner of a small photography studio in Calcutta, India,
maintained sporadically from 1994 to 1996, before his sudden
unexplained disappearance. The diary is a fictional 'found archive'
that contains his collection of photographic prints, letters, torn
pages from books, newspaper and magazine cuttings, declassified
police records, polaroids and print advertisements obtained from
different sources. Through these documents spanning the twentieth
century, he attempts to trace photographic 'evidence' and
information about an elusive woman who seemingly does not age
through a century. Mr Bose's search is also a journey through the
local history of vernacular photography and regional publications
that reflect popular culture, politics, fashion, design,
advertising and other iconography, and their transformations over
time. In this book, images serve both as the primary objects of
interest and a narrative device. The cover plot interrogates the
veracity of photographs - the way they are used as indices and
evidence of a person's existence in spatio-temporal reality. These
images are staged in variously contrived scenarios, often taking
cues from the several utilitarian subsets of twentieth-century
photography-the wedding portrait, the convocation photo, the
vacation/holiday photo, candid snapshots, product advertisements-as
though taken by different fictional photographers using different
image-making aesthetics, techniques and formats appropriate to the
time/place/visual cultures that those prototypes historically
belong to. Referring to the genre of historiographic metafiction,
fictional text and visual elements based on real events and
characters are introduced to enable this 'found archive' assume
certain characteristics of a hoax.
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