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Ketaki Sheth

Mumbai-based photographer Ketaki Sheth began taking pictures of Mumbai in the late 1980s, under the guidance of renowned photographer Raghubir Singh. Her fascination with the city of Mumbai and its teeming masses extends beyond the three P’s most other photographers seem intrigued by; namely the poverty, the population and the pollution of the city. Sheth captures the essence of the ‘Mumbaiite’; the vivacity of the people that dwell in the ‘city that never sleeps’. Her images focus on the strong undercurrent of unity that prevails over all differences in the city, may they be social, economic, religious or gender related. Rather than drawing sympathy from her viewers, Sheth encourages them to rethink the way they see in Mumbai.

Ketaki Sheth began taking pictures of Mumbai in the late 1980s, under the guidance of renowned photographer Raghubir Singh. Her fascination with the city of Mumbai and its teeming masses extends beyond the three P’s most other photographers seem intrigued by; namely the poverty, the population and the pollution of the city. Sheth captures the essence of the ‘Mumbaiite’; the vivacity of the people that dwell in the ‘city that never sleeps’. Her images focus on the strong undercurrent of unity that prevails over all differences in the city, may they be social, economic, religious or gender related. Rather than drawing sympathy from her viewers, Sheth encourages them to rethink the way they see in Mumbai.

Sheth began to invest in digital and colour photography while on a shoot with Prabhakar Jog, an acclaimed 80-year-old potter and idol-maker. They travelled together over 600 km from Mumbai to his village in Ratnagiri to shoot the idols he’d made. “I returned home on a digital high with a memory card stuffed with images,” Sheth recounts. “But the pleasure was short-lived. I discovered to my horror that many of the images were reticulated by a flawed sensor of the new camera.” This disaster motivated Sheth to hastily retreat to the safety of film. However, by then she’d already gotten hooked to the immediacy of the digital medium and found herself longing for the magic of seeing images instantly, not fiddling with film rolls or worrying about shooting in low-light situations. To her, it seemed inevitable that she should return to using the M9 that she’d had refurbished with a new sensor. The series with Jog was not meant to be. She returned to the streets in search of a new subject. “Seeing that blue stool was a calling. I stepped in,” Sheth says over email. “After that it was another six months of photographing Manori residents as my sitters, and I was still not thinking about a book, or a show. I really just wanted good pictures. I was new to both colour and digital. I was sucked in. It was after six months that I felt I must spread my wings and enter this world in other places in India.” In the following three years, from 2015 to 2018, Sheth found over 65 studios across eight Indian states, many standing as a vestige of a once popular tradition of representation. ‘I saw a changing India: a seven-year-old, so sure of the camera she almost breathed into it; a beautiful girl, denied a college education because her parents expected her to marry, wanted pictures of herself, not selfies; the proud man with his steel canister, unfazed that his days as a milkman are numbered; an ordinary man with his extraordinary wife who felt the need to step out of the picture for her; a girl in pink with a post, a bit hesitant at first, opened to the camera as if she was once a painter’s muse; an ailing studio owner who directed the shot of himself, choosing the seat, angle and backdrop with confident ease,’ Sheth writes in the publication.

Education
Completed BA in 1979 in English Literature from Elphinston College, Bombay University, Mumbai, India. In 1979, was awarded scholarship from Department of Communication Arts, Cornwell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America. In 1993, was awarded The Sanskriti Award for Indian Photography, New Delhi, India. In 2006, was awarded the Overseas Photographer Higashikawa Award,Higashikawa, Japan.