A Minute of Make-believe

In collaboration with Bharat Bhushan Mahajan and his son Amit Mahajan, practitioners of street portrait photography, the manual images produced for this series using a box camera intersect with a contemporary culture of image making. The series' title refers to the box camera used for making it, also called the ‘minute camera’, as it has an approximately one-minute exposure time.

This easy-to-make camera democratised photography by allowing ordinary people to have their photographs taken and became quite popular in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Myanmar between the 1950s-80s. Fantasies and aspirations formed an integral part of the resultant imagery as photomontage and ‘trick photography’ were extensively used to create images. Browsing through the Mahajan archive and using it as a source for inspiration, the images produced, whether as box camera snapshots, analogue montages or polaroid prints, cross-reference historical images as well as present trends, underscored at times by the practice of hand-colouring in some instances. The images, often with unexpected results, are further framed or displayed as posts from Instagram, where hashtags and comments run as sub-texts to address the ‘virtual’ turn of photography. Using physical gestures to interact with the ‘posts’ re-contextualises and extrapolates new meanings of photography as a popular artefact.