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拍品專文
“An endearing aspect of Sooni Taraporevala’s photographic documentation of Parsis is the ‘insiders view’ of her community. It cuts out the exoticism an outsider might have brought in and makes the works a true representation of the lives of Parsis [...] As a result, her work is among the most-detailed visual documentations of the Parsi community in 20th century India” (S. Ghosh, ‘Chronicler of a community’, The Indian Express, 4 March 2013, accessed July 2022).
A self-taught photographer, deeply influenced by the balance of construction and candidness in the work of Henri Cartier Bresson, Taraporevala started taking photos of her family and surroundings on moving back to Bombay following her studies in the United States. These black and white photos from the early 1980s now represent the beginnings of a significant documentary body of work on the Parsi community that has occupied Taraporevala for well over three decades now. Comprising more than a hundred images, this body of work has been exhibited and published to great acclaim in India and abroad, including in the photobook PARSIS, The Zoroastrians of India, A Photographic Journey, which Taraporevala self-published in 2000.
Taraporevala recalls that the tipping point for this project came when she met the photographer Raghubir Singh in 1982, the same year she captured this intimate glimpse of the interiors of a Fire Temple. “[Singh] saw in my eclectic collection of photographs, the subject that had been staring me in the face but that I had failed to see: a photographic study of the community to which I belong. What had begun nostalgically and personally, grew into a more objective project that encompassed a world larger than my immediate family” (Artist statement, H. Chopra, ‘Memoirs of a photographer’, The Hindu, 16 September 2013, accessed July 2022).
A self-taught photographer, deeply influenced by the balance of construction and candidness in the work of Henri Cartier Bresson, Taraporevala started taking photos of her family and surroundings on moving back to Bombay following her studies in the United States. These black and white photos from the early 1980s now represent the beginnings of a significant documentary body of work on the Parsi community that has occupied Taraporevala for well over three decades now. Comprising more than a hundred images, this body of work has been exhibited and published to great acclaim in India and abroad, including in the photobook PARSIS, The Zoroastrians of India, A Photographic Journey, which Taraporevala self-published in 2000.
Taraporevala recalls that the tipping point for this project came when she met the photographer Raghubir Singh in 1982, the same year she captured this intimate glimpse of the interiors of a Fire Temple. “[Singh] saw in my eclectic collection of photographs, the subject that had been staring me in the face but that I had failed to see: a photographic study of the community to which I belong. What had begun nostalgically and personally, grew into a more objective project that encompassed a world larger than my immediate family” (Artist statement, H. Chopra, ‘Memoirs of a photographer’, The Hindu, 16 September 2013, accessed July 2022).