The bigger picture

Photographer Tara Laure Claire's staged photographs pay homage to India's kitschy photo studios from a bygone era that provided a backdrop to many family portraits, finds SHRIYA ZAMINDAR

-  SHRIYA ZAMINDAR

Picture this, a wall painted with a panoramic view of a meadow and a house on the hills. Stylistically, the backdrop looks quite simple, but you sit in the foreground like a deer caught in the headlights, trying your best to stay still as a blinding flash goes off. Often, this is how family portraits highlighting landmark moments were preserved. In her ongoing photo series The Studio, Franco-Indian photographer and filmmaker Tara Laure Claire finds a fascination with the archetypal photo studio, which was all the rage before the digital camera. It provided her with a path to rediscover her roots through the gripping nostalgia of these performative portraits. These were photographs found framed and hung on walls in homes, placed in thick and worn-out family albums pictures that are somehow beautifully garish in their appearance but which symbolised a significant chapter in the lives of their subjects.