In July 2011, Chaitanya Guttikar along with three friends retraced the steps of Mahatma Gandhi, walking from Sabarmati Ashram to the village of Dandi, documenting the surrounding villages and people on the way. The journey consisted of about 450 km and 25 days of walking through fields, highways, riverbeds and swamps.
Guttikar speaks about this journey and presents photographs contextualizing alternative photography and photography in general to its natural affinity towards blending activity and enquiry through inherently collaborative processes. AS he says, “this walk is for me an attempt at understanding the Mahatma by putting myself in his shoes. Exploring visually the social, geographical, ideological, emotional and strategic facets that made the civil disobedience movement a success, so that we can repeat the strategy to achieve similar freedom of thought in other arenas, specifically, photography in India.”
Chaitanya Guttikar became devoted to creating hand-crafted photographs while pursuing his doctorate in the United States. He first encountered platinum-palladium prints in 2007 during a gallery visit in New York and fell in love. He has been exploring and researching cyanotypes, platinum-palladium and other alternative processes ever since. In May 2010, he left his professorial job at University of Miami to return to India. He is now a director of the Goa Center for Alternative photography (Goa-CAP) and runs his own documentary photography business from Pune.
Respondents: Amrita Gupta (Art Historian and Writer, Mumbai) and Noopur Desai (Art Researcher and Writer, Pune).
This program is organized in collaboration with TIFA Working Studios, Pune.
5th May, 2017 | 6.00 pm – 7.30 pm | Open to all.
