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The One Rupee Communication Industry

Chirodeep Chaudhuri, photography artist based in Mumbai looks at the coin telephone entrepreneurs through his camera and presents a series at the Gallery 88, Mumbai.  Chaudhuri’s photographs do not offer answers, but open out marginalized histories and enterprises of this metropolis via an aesthetic exploration of its street graphics, Amrita Gupta Singh.

How would one define ‘enterprise’ in the context of the financial capital of India, Bombay? As a city which has its inherent contradictions and its multiple sub-cultures, with migrating populations both within and without, all striving for the ‘better life’, the term enterprise assumes manifold proportions. The vendors on the local trains selling various paraphernalia, the street hawkers conducting brisk business, the gaudy tourist tongas that emulate mythological chariots (run by under-fed horses) that map South Bombay, its teeming citizens contributing to the nation’s economy despite terrorist blasts, floods and a creaking public system, enterprise would also mean sheer grit to survive and strive for square-feet of space and its corresponding economics and ‘luxury’ factors. In a consumerist/capitalist society that is defined by the Sensex, EMI’s, mutual funds and ‘life’ insurance policies, to be ‘enterprising’ would also mean investing in additional jobs or ‘side’ businesses that provide ‘extra’ support to existing financial structures.

The photographs of Chirodeep Chaudhuri, ‘The One-Rupee Entrepreneur’ presented by Project 88, Mumbai, explore the significations of the term ‘enterprise’ in the purely local context of Mumbai. The concept developed in a workshop with students in which words that define Bombay/Mumbai were explored and ‘enterprise’ was one of them. This became a catalyst for the photographer to explore both conceptually and aesthetically one of the quirky entrepreneurships of the metropolis. The subjects under scrutiny are the local red and yellow coin operated public telephones that are ubiquitous in the everyday landscape of the city. This phenomenon becomes all the more interesting given the penetration of cellular technology across all classes, where acquiring a mobile phone is no longer a privilege of the elite class, and a thriving second-hand mobile phone industry exists to make cellular technology available to all. Hence, what could be the use of these ‘one rupee’ public phones in such a scenario and the dynamics of its sustainability? One could also understand these photographs as ideological/spatial formations of a metropolis and aspects of urban marginality, where these phones are largely used by the working class. The shops that offer this facility also belong to the tertiary sectors of the city. Every street corner and multiple humble shops and stalls sport this equipment, placed on stools, counters or iron brackets against the shop walls. One does not have to pay rent (which are exorbitant in Mumbai) for extra space for this ‘side’ business, which allows the owners to earn some additional amount via a minimal investment.

Photography as a medium has had had multi-dimensional maneuvers, and the thrust has always been how to transform the photograph and making it conceptually and aesthetically operative by the insertion of the artistic Self and personal narrative. While these photographs of Chaudhuri have a documentative value, they also become aesthetically appealing in the juxtapositions of the imagery of the phone against a graffiti drawing of a signage of a butcher’s shop, displaying hand-craft skills that epitomize most Indian street graphics or against mineral water bottles and Coke/Pepsi cans, bringing in aspects of the local and the global. The images are striking in the medley of colours and scale and the exclusion of any human presence, where every surface becomes a kaleidoscope of expression and communication, the density of the street imagery of the city generating a unique visual collage, often incongruous and ironical in their representations. Chaudhuri’s photographs do not offer answers, but open out marginalized histories and enterprises of this metropolis via an aesthetic exploration of its street graphics.