Jyoti Bhatt’s love affair with photography began in 1957. The Indian artist, then 23, attended “The Family of Man,” a touring exhibition of humanist photographs curated by Edward Steichen, which had traveled to the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. “I think that inspired me most by showing me what photography can do,” Bhatt tells me in a recent interview. “I had always kept a sketchbook, but with a photograph I could record everything I saw and not just certain details.”
Bhatt, who turns 89 next month, has long been known for his talents as a figurative painter and printmaker. But in recent years it is his black-and-white photography that has become increasingly sought after, with institutions such as the Tate and MoMA acquiring several of his more abstract, experimental pictures. Now his photographs are the subject of a comprehensive retrospective that inaugurates the opening, on February 18, of the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), India.
