Mastering the Lens : Before And After Cartier-Bresson In Pondicherry

In the attempt to trace the development of photography in Pondicherry spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries this publication has at its core the unpublished album by renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in April 1950. He took the last pictures of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh in the company of his spiritual companion, ‘the Mother’. The visual material is enhanced by extraordinary images by Indian photographers from the same period such as Tara Jauhar and Venkatesh Shirodkar published here for the first time.