Sunil Sethi: Images that hold the world in our head

AL FRESCO

How heartening it is to find that some of the best stories being told in book releases for the festival holidays are told through photographs! A string of recent books affirm the American critic Susan Sontag's seminal critique on photography: "Movies and television programmes light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object ... the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads "" as an anthology of images."

First off the mark is Nemai Ghosh, Satyajit Ray's remarkable still photographer, who, after several years of labour, has produced a rich treat for art lovers. Faces of Indian Art (Art Alive Gallery; Rs 6,500) is a voluminous record, an archival visual tract and a collector's item. Ghosh takes us where angels fear to tread: the interior world of 52 of India's greatest modern artists "" living, deceased or disabled "" at work in their paint-spattered studios, surrounded by their materials, artefacts and artworks. As a black-and-white prelude to the bulk of full-colour images, he publishes never-before-seen photographs of the all-time 20th century greats of Bengal: Ramkinkar Baij, Jamini Roy, Benodebehari Mukherjee and others.

To perceive a finished artwork is not the same as to observe the process of its creation. To see artists at the peak of their form, exuding a febrile energy or lost in contemplation, is an experience at once unsettling and becalming. Ghosh captures the scenes with vigour and attention to detail; and they are accompanied by texts by scholars and critics. You can visit S H Raza in his Paris studio, watch Manjit Bawa swaying in Sufi-like ecstasy before a canvas, A Ramachandran dwarfed by a vast mural of lotus leaves, Tyeb Mehta oblivious to the Lokhandwala high-rises that hem his bare-as-bones work space, Vivan Sundaram tinkering with tin cans, and many others. The images leap off the page with the electric shock of static.

Mumbai-based photographer Ketaki Sheth, after her highly original and moving book Twinspotting a few years ago, which documented the lives of twins in the Patel community in India and England, returns with Bombay Mix: Street Photographs (Dewi Lewis publishing; Rs 1,800), with an introduction by Suketu Mehta. Sheth's black-and-white images of a city that is harsh, gritty and threatening achieve a balance which is, in fact, the opposite in the life of the people who inhabit it. She finds composure, even repose, among the children, dock workers and worshippers: hidden radiance in Mumbai's dark, decaying crannies. Sheth quotes her mentor Raghubir Singh, the distinguished photographer who died in 1999. He used a sporting analogy for a photographer on the prowl. "Watch re-runs of famous tennis matches. Look for that winning ball on the edge of the line, that's the kind of shot you want."

At the other end of the social spectrum, Mumbai's sequestered life of privilege and power is revealed in a profusely pictorial memoir Mr & Mrs Dutt (Roli Books; Rs 695) by the two daughters of actor-politicians Nargis and Sunil Dutt. Hype and hypocrisy often reduce records of famous figures in Indian film and politics to indigestible hagiography. When Namrata Dutt Kumar and Priya Dutt began to clear their father's cupboards after his death, out fell bags of photographs, private letters and other memorabilia. Spurred by the images, they have compiled a book of surprising candour and clarity.

Carefully shielded from the contagion of celebrity, the Dutt children grew up innocent of their parents' public lives. By the time they found out, their world was shaken by tragedy, humiliation and despair. Look at the record, the Dutt sisters seem to ask, and decide if fame and power are a safe cover from the hardships of illness and failure or an unfair incentive to move on?

As Susan Sontag says, photographs are the detritus of mortality and a portable summary of our lives.