A Painter with a Camera: Jyoti Bhatt

A Painter with a Camera brings together a focused selection of photographic works by Jyoti Bhatt that foreground an essential dimension of his practice: photography as a site of sustained experimentation rather than mere documentation.

The exhibition title pays homage to Painters with a Camera (1968), a landmark group exhibition of seven artists including Jyoti Bhatt held at Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay, which boldly asserted photography’s credibility as an artistic medium at a time when it was largely excluded from institutional spaces.

Created between the 1960s through 1980s, the works on view encompass photographs fractured through the use of mirrors, lenses and multiple exposure, alongside darkroom interventions such as over-printing, masking using stencils, pushing contrast, cropping and enlarging. These are accompanied by images made using collage and hand painting. 

One of Bhatt’s most iconic motifs of The Face (1971), a high contrast image of a peacock seen through the silhouette of a human head, was created in the dark room using these techniques. 

Bhatt’s approach to photography is shaped by a painter’s sensibility — treating the image as a surface to be worked, revised and returned to over time. Long before digital manipulation became commonplace, he engaged the medium through analogue processes that emphasise duration, labour and material intelligence. Presented as  silver gelatin prints, these works allow viewers to encounter the photographs as they were first conceived. This body of work underscores Bhatt’s commitment to process and positions his practice within a broader history of experimental photography in the subcontinent and beyond.