It is not easy to categorise people like Aradhana Seth. Try confining them within boundaries, they will slip out of there before you even know it. Aradhana is a photographer, filmmaker, production designer and installation artist. She writes as well like her brother Vikram Seth and mother Leila Seth. But nothing is forced. The Goa-based artist says it all comes naturally to her. “And in a way, they are all connected,” she says.
The artist was invited to bring her mobile photo studio at Travel Photo Jaipur, an open-air photography festival recently. Those interested would walk up to her cart designed like a car and pose holding the steering against the painted backdrop and get photographed. “It is a combination of so many things. It is an installation. It is design. It is photography and it is also about anthropology because a portrait taken in a particular place comes to represent its culture, its people,” says the artist who has taken her mobile studio to Vancouver and Kochi besides Jaipur till now. She maintains a studio in Goa as well where passers-by and neighbours are free to walk in to get clicked anytime. “The whole idea started in Goa only. There people come to me but then I thought why not go to people.”
In Jaipur, she must have shot about 100 people and they ranged from the participants at the festival to visitors to the staff at the festival venue. “At Jawahar Kala Kendra the woman who was cleaning also got herself clicked. Then at Hawa Mahal, I shot a lot of men. I was amazed to see the number of men coming into the complex and when I started shooting them, I found out that they are all shopkeepers who come to use the washroom there got curious about the exhibitions there and came. From them I got to know about the city so you also engage with the city in the process,” says Aradhana who also takes down the names and contact details of her sitters.
But there is no finality to the project. She doesn’t know what she is going to do with the images collected. “I collect backdrops, I have been collecting old photos taken in studios and then there are my images but I have no specific idea in mind. Would it be an exhibition or a book, I can’t say,” she says.
Aradhana Seth has been the art director of films such as Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” and “Earth”.
She has been the production designer for “Fire”, “Earth”, “West is West” and “Don”.
She has had a solo show of painting and photography in Mumbai.
