India, a country rich in talent, diversity, and culture, has given the world some of the most famous and talented artists across different genres. From amazing painters who blended Indian and Western techniques, to Sitar maestros who collaborated with ‘The Beatles’, Indian artists have given the world some of the best paintings, ragas, voices, and beats.
Here we list some of the most famous Indian artists across genres.
In 1967 romcom “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner,” Sidney Poitier’s dashing doctor is dropped into the lives of the Draytons, a White middle class family, when their daughter arrives home and announces she has a fiancé. The parents are liberals, but the news is shocking; they’re not sure if they approve of an interracial marriage. No matter that this man is handsome and of spotless character – he’s Sidney Poitier, for crying out loud – his presence, in all its Blackness, marks an intrusion, upending this hitherto White space.
Now imagine we know nothing about the Draytons. They could be civil rights campaigners or conservatives or card-carrying members of the KKK. And no Hollywood ending is guaranteed. That is the provocative space a puckish Omar Victor Diop finds himself in in “Being There.”
Conceived by British photographer Lee Shulman and Senegalese self-portraitist Diop, the series sees the duo utilize a collection of family photos from 1950s and 1960s America, editing Diop into a series of intimate scenes, both public and private, in spaces where Black people were often shut out.
The 60 or so photos, Kodachrome slides purchased on eBay by Shulman years ago, are drawn from his “Anonymous Project,” so named because Shulman has no idea of the identities of any of the people in them. The collection has spurred on multiple side projects, including a book with British photographer Martin Parr, and now “Being There,” which debuted at Paris Photo in November 2023 and was recently turned into a coffee table book.
“Being There” came to life when Shulman noticed many of the slides contained an empty seat – presumably that the photographer had vacated to take the photo. “There was an absence,” he told CNN in a joint video interview with Diop. That they were taken in America circa the civil rights movement, but also of a segregated South, “played on my mind a lot,” he explained. That absence became abstracted. The person missing from the seat evolved into a totem of worlds and peoples often excluded from the privileges of White America. “Every time I saw that chair, I saw Omar in (it),” Shulman added.
Though the two photographers had never met, it tracks. Shulman owned a few works from the acclaimed self-portraitist, who has prior experience in this area. Diop’s series “Diaspora” depicts Africans outside of Africa at different points in history (albeit with some contemporary – often soccer related – props). That sense of play and humor continues in “Being There,” in which an oft-grinning Diop offers a cheeky presence in each still.
Shulman and Diop curated the selection together. “We were looking for images that covered a broad spectrum of life, because it’s a family photo album,” said Shulman.
There are signs of wealth: a ski holiday, a Hawaiian jaunt, a trip to the Grand Canyon, alongside more modest adventures like a roadside picnic and a day at the zoo. The camera goes inside homes, capturing Diop in the back of birthday celebrations and lounging with families. However quotidian, that these moments were captured by cameras is a sign of race and class privilege, argued Shulman.
Other photographs, by nature of their location, are more charged. Diop splashes around in a public swimming pool; graduates from college; sits in a busy bar. He’s surrounded by White faces as he does so, occupying spaces which were historically segregated in some states. “The political potential of this series made it very easy for me to jump into this,” Diop said.
“We tend to have this glamorized gaze towards history. And in doing so, we forget how it’s easy not to make room for someone who’s different,” he added. “(The series) is an invitation to look at our lives nowadays and see how many people different from us that we allow into our intimate circles.”
Ironically, inserting Diop into these spontaneous shots involved a lot of planning. Period props and costumes were used by Diop in a greenscreen set, with rigs mimicking the lighting of each slide. Digital post-production slotted him into the photographs, approximating the grade and grain of Kodachrome film, along with any shadows, blur and movement in the shot.
Dressing up, Diop was struck by how much he looked like his father, who “laughed a lot going through the book,” the portraitist said.
“He’d been a student in Europe in the late ’50s, so he’d been sitting at these tables,” Diop added. “Of course, you can’t really compare (being an African in Europe) with what African Americans went through in the same era, but the idea of being different is something (they had in common).”
The collaborators never decided whether Diop is playing the same character in each photograph, or if it was a character at all, and not just Diop appearing as a time traveller. This ambiguity carries over into Diop’s relationship with the lens. “One of the reasons it works is that gaze he sometimes has towards the camera,” said Shulman, “you feel that he knows the photographer.” On the other hand, if it’s a case of Diop breaching the space-time continuum, photographs read as if he’s bringing the viewer in on the secret.
Likewise, neither resolved whether Diop was a welcome presence or gate-crasher in each scene.
Despite having the slides in his possession for years, Shulman still knows next to nothing about their subjects.
“As much as they’re anonymous, they tell us a lot,” he insisted. “Every time I look at these images, even without Omar in them, I feel these people are looking at us and telling us something about history.”
There is another, perhaps unintended, dimension to the photographs. The anonymity of the White people, and Shulman and Diop’s lack of desire to investigate them and their inner lives, forces the viewer to rely on sign and symbol to construct identity. We don’t know their politics, nor how they’d respond to Diop’s presence. Deprived of details, these lives become homogenized; bundled. In doing so, they’re treated like so many people of color were when portrayed by what was, for decades, a hegemonic Western – and almost exclusively White – lens, which had a knack for stripping away nuance. Diop’s winking presence, Black and African, seems to say, “Look where I am” but also, “See how you like it.”
Shulman insisted “there’s no pointing fingers in this book,” while later saying neither he nor Diop “feel like we own this project” now that’s out in the world and “lives its life.” All interpretations are valid, a fact they say excites them.
More than 60 years after the photos were taken, much of America appears different now. Gently probing, playfully satirical, Shulman and Diop remind us that much remains the same.
“It’s a very contemporary project,” Shulman said. “It has a lot of relevance to the world we live in today.”
“Being There” is published by Textuel and available now.
Shulman and Diop appear together just once, on the cover — a White British Jew and a Black Senegalese man alone together, exploring America’s broad horizons. “It really sums up a lot of the project for me,” said Shulman.
Pieces add up to an archive of a life lived deeply in Lyle Ashton Harris’s compelling survey at the Queens Museum.
If you’re a habitual saver, not to say hoarder, of personal memorabilia — snapshots, postcards, clippings, ticket stubs, notes-to-self, — the time comes when you need to figure out what to do with the stuff — sort-and-toss, or deep store? — if only to clear space for more.
The artist Lyle Ashton Harris is just such a saver, and he’s found a terrific solution. He’s turned some three decades-worth of loosely curated personal accumulation into one of the most remarkable bodies of American art around, a data-dense, visually compelling archive, not just of one life but, as seen through that life, of the social and political history of Black queer culture in the post-Stonewall years.
The basic dynamic of his method and perspective is encapsulated in the phrase used as the title of his first New York survey, “Lyle Ashton Harris: Our First and Last Love,” now at the Queens Museum. He came across the phrase on a slip of paper in a Chinese fortune cookie back in the early 1990s, and pasted it, as he regularly did other finds, in a notebook.
That notebook is in the show, and if you track it down you discover that the “fortune” actually reads in full: “Our first and last love is … Self-Love.” And right from the start, Harris has used self-image, directly or indirectly — who he is, what he has — as a tool of personal and political investigation.
His earliest work is a form of theatrical self-portraiture. As an undergraduate in the late 1980s at Wesleyan University, where he came out as gay and was one of the few Black students, he photographed himself in a blond wig and whiteface, flipping old machismo and minstrelsy tropes that still attached to Blackness. In self-portraits from a few years later he pushed a little harder.
There’s an anachronistic beauty to the images in Trouble Every Day, a new book exploring trans identity through paganism, rituals, and Edenic landscapes. For the book’s creator, Eddie Langham, this natural landscape – the images were shot on location in Sydenham Hill Woods – is at the core of the images themselves. Langham says that they wanted to “evoke the natural process of budding, blooming, rotting, and decay in the story of the book, which I think most queer and trans people could relate to in the expression of their own identity.”
‘The Players’, as they’re dubbed in Trouble Every Day, are Puer Deorum, Rae Martins Ashton, and Donna Marcus Duke (whose text, Marsha, Gardens, and Fucking Liberals accompanies photographs by Eerie Rose and Karin Sarkizoba). They seem both at home in this landscape and alien to it, somewhere between the past and our own contemporary moment, a continuation of the cyclical growth, decay, and rebirth of gardens and the natural world.
For Langham – who says that their work is informed by historical fashion – the historical references to the aesthetics and silhouettes of royal courts “represent the idea that trans identity has been here since the beginning of culture yet has been ostracized from art history”. The book is designed to offer an “alternative timeline to our erasure, while centering and celebrating trans and queer people in aesthetic fashions and regalia we wouldn’t have had access to”. This idea is echoed by Rose, who gives credit to the element of fantasy that exists in these images: “If we did have this history, what would it have looked like? What do we want future generations to be able to look back on.”
Trans identity has always had a complex relationship with the past; whether through historical erasure, or the burdens and expectations that trans people might feel now. This tension exists in Fucking Liberals, the accompany text by Donna Marcus Duke, which grapples with the inescapable image of Marsha P. Johnson wearing a flower crown. The essay tries to make sense of what happens when a person becomes an icon; as Duke puts it, “ trans people, our relationship with own materiality and how it’s ascribed by others can often be fraught, which is why I think there is a tendency to find refuge in the spiritual”. Trouble Ever Day is reaching for both the spirituality in material life, and what it means to make spirituality less abstract.
For Langham, these idea are expressed in the relationship that Trouble Every Day has with paganism. They explain, “So many English historical folkloric traditions have a trans energy which sits at odds with our erasure from history.” This also comes through in the images themselves; the flowing gowns and elaborate adornments – veils, armor, hoods – alongside the bucolic background and decaying ruins feel ripped out of folk horror. For Rose, their own queerness is “found in paganism and the occult […] the persecution of something as natural as paganism, one of our oldest forms of spirituality, feels adjacent to the queer experience in many ways.” Langham is poetic about this: “Transitioning and making oneself’s outside align with their inside is in some ways a magical and supernatural experience as it goes against the patriarchal assigned ‘order’ of things.”
“Transitioning and making oneself’s outside align with their inside is in some ways a magical and supernatural experience as it goes against the patriarchal assigned ‘order’ of things” – Eddie Langham
The central metaphors in Trouble Every Day – gardens and the natural world, the material ruins of times gone by – show a refusal to let the images and text simply gesture towards something utopian, instead offering something strange and compelling, even magical, but that you need to surrender yourself to. Community is at the heart of this – those that have been lost, and those yet to come – which Duke makes reference to in their essay, writing, “We wear flowers as a garden, because together we’re divine.” Whether or not this divinity is attainable isn’t made clear, and nor should it be.
The transformational nature of Trouble Every Day – whether in the image of the garden, or the mutability of trans identity – offers a more material kind of freedom than that, something that Rose describes through the language of the garden itself: “Just as flowers come and go, no matter how cold the frost is, come spring they will bloom again – so will queer and trans people. These are flowers that grow through the cracks in paving stones, creep in through the bricks, take root under the foundations of your home. Queerness is as natural as the ancient forests, and older than the stone circles.”
The copyright infringement lawsuit between UK photographer Adrian Boot and streaming service Napster — over the allegedly unauthorized use of a photo of Reggae and Dancehall artist Sugar Minott — has been settled out of court.
According to court filings obtained by DancehallMag, both parties reached a mutual agreement on May 14, which resulted in the suit being dismissed before it could proceed to trial.
The specific terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Boot had sought statutory damages, which can run up to $150,000, an award of US$15,114 for Napster’s alleged willful infringement, attorney fees, and costs.
The photograph at the center of the dispute was taken in 1979 during a session at Minott’s home in London, Boot said in his complaint filed in March 2023. It was later used as the cover art for the 2005 album Sugar Minott At Studio One.
Boot claimed that while UK label Soul Jazz Records paid him £552.25 to use the photo on the album cover, Napster did not have the right to use the original photograph (not the album cover) on its website.
In his lawsuit, the photographer argued that Napster’s use of the digital image on their site would have required a separate license fee of £2,147.56 through his company, Urbanimage.
However, Napster — under parent company Rhapsody International Inc. — argued that by acquiring distribution rights for the album, they implicitly gained rights to the artwork, including the original photograph.
The company claimed that the photo’s use was legal under licenses passed through several entities, from Soul Jazz Records to music distributor Play It Again Sam (PIAS), and ultimately to Rhapsody/Napster.
In a ruling last month, U.S. District Judge Kymberly K. Evanson denied the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment, citing issues of material fact that should be resolved by a jury. She noted the “scant evidence” regarding whether Rhapsody’s use fell within an implied license granted to Soul Jazz Records.
Regarding Rhapsody’s claim of a license through its contract with PIAS, Judge Evanson said, “Because the Court finds that on this record, there are questions of fact as to whether Rhapsody’s use was licensed either expressly or impliedly, and that issue is dispositive to both cross-motions for summary judgment, both motions must be denied and this case must proceed to trial.”
The trial was set for June 10 before the settlement was reached.
Adrian Boot, a former Physics teacher in Jamaica, is renowned for his photographs of several other famous musicians, including Bob Marley.
The Sugar Minott At Studio One album is a collection of the Jamaican singer’s work at the legendary Studio One during the 1970s. It included songs such as Hang On Natty, Vanity, Jah Jah Children, and Love Gonna Pack Up.
Miniott passed away in July 2010 at age 54.
