Camera Obscura

The dying art of hand-painting photographs

- Shruti Janardhan

On the afternoon of 29 November, when I visited Jaykumar Shankar’s small office in Delhi’s Patel Nagar, his desk was strewn with hand-painted photographs and bottles of transparent photo colours. The photographs were for his upcoming exhibition with Vasantha Yogananthan, a photographer based in Paris who describes his work as “photographic practice that addresses the space between documentary and fiction.” The two began their collaboration in 2016, and Yogananthan’s work, A Myth of Two Souls—to which Shankar contributed—was released the following year.

Shankar flipped through some of the hundreds of black-and-white photographs that he has painstakingly coloured by hand. “If someone who is not used to transparent photo colour uses it on the photograph, it will take only one dab for the photograph to be ruined,” he told me. “It is tricky to use this colour if you can’t do it with finesse, because otherwise the photograph will get spotted, and then it takes you additional time to clean it before you start again.”