Abstract

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This article attempts to reconstruct the context of Painters with a Camera, an exhibition held at Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the late 1960s by a group of young teachers (almost all former students) at the Faculty of Fine Arts in the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Although the exhibition has fallen out of the discourse of modern South Asian photographic practice, the exhibition offers a look how the photographic medium was utilised in the context of Baroda at this time. Existing documentation of the exhibition, including its title image by VS Patel, convey the theoretical possibilities that the exhibition’s constituent photographers posed vis-à-vis the printed/photographic image. It will address issues such as the pedagogical denial of photography at Baroda’s Faculty, the exhibition’s location at Jehangir Art Gallery, and the reintroduction of the hand into mechanical photographic practice.