Spring 2008

Dear friends
Tasveer Ghar (the House of Pictures), a trans-national digital archive of south Asia's popular visual culture, is happy to announce the first anniversary of its founding. We formally started in January 2007 with an aim to collect, digitize, and document various materials produced by South Asia's exciting popular visual sphere, including posters,
calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.

In July 2007, Tasveer Ghar awarded a few short-term fellowships to document several unique forms of popular visual arts of India with a focus on "Gender, Nation and Spaces for the Everyday", to culminate in the digitization of several collected specimens and their virtual exhibition on our website at the end of the fellowship year. It was an
exciting beginning with three principal Fellows and six other grantees spread all over India, who began working on a really wide spectrum of topics ranging from South Indian display dolls to Bhojpuri raunchy album covers and much more!

We are now pleased to announce the first batch of these exciting virtual galleries. You can visit these online exhibits and enjoy the richness of their visuals and accompanied essays on the following links. We would be very happy to receive your feedback about them:

1. Miniature Societies and Grihani Aesthetics: Display Dolls from Southern India
By Annapurna Garimella
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/annapurna/

2. Catering to Indian and British Tastes: Gender in Early Indian Print Advertisements
By Javed Masood
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/javed/

3. Miss Use - A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri Music Album Covers
By Vishal Rawlley
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/vishal/

4. Objects of Desire: Commodification of Gender on the Titles of Popular Hindi Novels
By Atmaram K. Bhakal
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/atmaram/

5. Remediation: Iconic Images and Everyday Spaces - 'Female Film Stars' in Print Media
by Madhuja Mukherji
http://tasveerghar.net/2007/madhuja/

The above galleries are part of a larger series of visual presentations which we hope to continue evolving with much more exciting material. Don't forget to visit on our website some of the earlier visual galleries produced by eminent art collectors and scholars. Here are the virtual galleries by some of our senior scholars/collectors:

When a Language Becomes a Mother/Goddess - An Image Essay on Tamil
by Sumathi Ramaswamy
http://tasveerghar.net/stamil/

Another new and interesting feature on our website is the "Picture of the Month" where we present a unique photograph or image depicting a quirky example from South Asian popular culture, and expect the readers/visitors to comment on it. See one of our first such image on the link below:

http://tasveerghar.net/picomonth.html

INVITATION:
Tasveer Ghar also invites artists, art collectors, photographers, students and others to contribute exciting images representing examples of popular visual culture of India/South Asia. You can send us photo prints, old photographs, old printed material, photo negatives, transparencies, digital photographs, high-resolution scans, posters, calendar, old advertisements, printed packing material, wall graffiti, hoardings, road-side banners, or any other medium, preferably mass-produced or truly archival and rare, but representing certain popular trends of our society. You can get a sense of the kinds of materials we are looking for in our Call for Proposals on our website. Your contributions, if accepted by us, would be compensated with a basic honorarium. We can also sign a contract with you about the use of such images. Kindly send us samples of such art work, so that we can respond.

Your contribution to Tasveer Ghar could either be one or two interesting images, or a series of related images that we can use for a thematic virtual gallery. A virtual gallery is basically a compilation of images (say between 8 and 15, or even more, if necessary) depicting a unique aspect of popular visual culture. Such images are generally accompanied by a text introduction and detailed captions that weave all the images into one coherent presentation spread over several interactive pages on the website. The individual images could either be scans of authentic artwork or photographs of scenarios (streets or homes) where such public art is displayed. A contributor can either send us hard copies of images or electronic versions (scanned in the prescribed format). Tasveer Ghar will not buy or own the image contributed by you. If you submit hard copies of any
art work, we will return the same to you after digitizing it. The contributor would have to provide the text and captions for the images (or any other details that may be necessary for the gallery). We have also announced the Call for Proposal for our short-term fellowships for the year 2008. Deadline: 10th May 2008.

We also invite authors who have recently published books or essays on south Asian visual culture, or scholars hosting conferences on visual culture to inform us about their ventures, so that we can provide a link on our website to their books, conferences or other related resources.

Looking forward to your participation in the building of our virtual House of Pictures.

Christiane Brosius
Manishita Dass
Sumathi Ramaswamy
Yousuf Saeed

See our previous Newsletter (August 2007)