Portrait of An Artist

Portrait of An Artist is Rohit Chawla’s decade-long photographic exploration of the private spaces in which artists think, experiment and create. Moving away from conventional, manufactured portraiture, Chawla enters the studios of some of India’s most significant modern and contemporary artists, photographing them amid canvases, sculptures, books, tools, unfinished works and the accumulated traces of creative life.

The photographs are restrained, intimate and largely monochromatic, allowing personality, gesture, atmosphere and environment to become central to each portrait. Accompanying Chawla’s photographs are texts by curator, author and art historian Kishore Singh, who examines the individual relationship each artist has with their studio and practice.

Together, image and text create a significant visual and cultural archive of Indian art—capturing not simply what these artists look like, but something of the private worlds from which their public works emerge. The volume includes 130 photographs and profiles a remarkable cross-section of Indian art, with a foreword by Kiran Nadar and additional contributions including Rohit Chawla and Raghu Rai.