The grunge behind the glamour: What photographer Ketaki Sheth saw when she landed on a film set
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The movie star Rekha is curled up on a sofa. She’s looking into the distance. When the eye manages to tear itself away from her, other elements in the photograph become apparent: lighting equipment, sections of a glass table, a table cloth, a bird cage.
In another picture, Poonam Dhillon is in a Chevrolet, a side window framing her smiling face and her braided hair. Dhillon is shooting for the Hindi movie Kasam at Film City in Mumbai. Low-rising ruins loom behind her.
“They look like anthills,” Ketaki Sheth told Scroll.
In Flashback, Sheth’s suite of photographs of movie shoots, glamour and grunge meet in striking ways. The behind-the-scenes views don’t just reveal how films get made, but also how their production might appear to observers.
Out of the melee of moviemaking, Sheth plucks out the faces and bodies of stars and extras, technicians and hopefuls. By freezing moments of intense activity, the photographs create new meanings and narratives about what might have been going at the point when they were taken.
Flashback is the title of a book and a recently concluded show in Delhi, both organised by Sheth’s gallerist Devika Daulet-Singh and her company Photoink.
The 57 black-and-white photos were shot between 1985 and 1993, at a time when it was possible for...