The New Yorker:

The photographer Ketaki Sheth stumbled upon one of the dying businesses, which have been rendered obsolete in the smartphone era—then made it her mission to commemorate them in style.

By M. Z. Adnan

The Jagdish Photo Studio in Manori appeared to Ketaki Sheth as a kind of apparition. A photographer from Mumbai, Sheth owns a home in the coastal village, about a sixty-kilometre drive north of the city, and had made innumerable visits there without ever knowing of the studio’s existence. One afternoon in 2014, she was out taking pictures on a Leica M9 when she came upon the business, wedged between an old grain shop and a hardware store—“a fairly nondescript little space,” as Sheth put it recently. An employee manning the front desk explained that it was the only place in the area for customers to have photos taken for their Aadhaar cards, biometric I.D.s issued to almost all of India’s adult population. Sometimes, the employee mentioned, people came for portraits to mark special occasions or holidays. Sheth’s interest was piqued. “Are you expecting people today?” she asked.

Jagdish became the first of more than sixty-five studios across the country that Sheth would photograph over the next three years. The resulting series, “Photo Studio,” later published by Photoink as a book of the same name, was a departure from the black-and-white, analog documentary style that she’d employed on previous projects, including images of the streets of Mumbai as well as visual ethnographies of twins and of the Siddis, an Afro-Indian ethnic group.

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