Worker drilling inside a coal mine, Asansol By Ahmed Ali
Silver gelatin print with selenium toning, 24 x 30 in, 1951
In the decades following Independence, industrial photography in India played its part in the great act of nation building—and Ahmed Ali (1923–2016) was one of its most influential practitioners. Ali developed an interest in photography at age 11 when he was gifted a box camera, but his first professional assignment was photographing the Tata Steel Plant in 1947. After WWII, there was a rising demand for photography in sales, promotions and advertising, and Ali found his niche in commercial photography. He set up his studio, Universal Camera Arts, in Calcutta in 1948.
Photoink, which exclusively represents the Ahmed Ali archive, has been showcasing his work at the last few editions of the India Art Fair, including the one that recently concluded in February. The gallery has digitized and catalogued over 1,00,000 of his negatives, with a focus on his impressive, but lesser-known, corpus of indu-strial photographs.
“Starting out when both industry and advertising were in their nascent stages in the post-Independence period, Ahmed Ali through his extensive oeuvre became one of the pioneers of advertising and industrial photography in India. His sprawling body of work is a priceless historical document of the processes of nation-building and its consolidation through the 1950s to the 1980s,” reads a curatorial note.
This image of a brawny miner was taken for Macneil and Barry Limited, a managing agent with interests in coal, tea, shipping, jute and cotton, which eventually evolved into the Williamson Magor Group. Ali was an accomplished studio and portrait photographer, and this is evident in the masterful lighting of the miner’s image, in conditions which couldn’t have been less favourable.
...In the decades following Independence, industrial photography in India played its part in the great act of nation building—and Ahmed Ali (1923–2016) was one of its most influential practitioners. Ali developed an interest in photography at age 11 when he was gifted a box camera, but his first professional assignment was photographing the Tata Steel Plant in 1947. After WWII, there was a rising demand for photography in sales, promotions and advertising, and Ali found his niche in commercial photography. He set up his studio, Universal Camera Arts, in Calcutta in 1948.
Photoink, which exclusively represents the Ahmed Ali archive, has been showcasing his work at the last few editions of the India Art Fair, including the one that recently concluded in February. The gallery has digitized and catalogued over 1,00,000 of his negatives, with a focus on his impressive, but lesser-known, corpus of indu-strial photographs.
“Starting out when both industry and advertising were in their nascent stages in the post-Independence period, Ahmed Ali through his extensive oeuvre became one of the pioneers of advertising and industrial photography in India. His sprawling body of work is a priceless historical document of the processes of nation-building and its consolidation through the 1950s to the 1980s,” reads a curatorial note.
This image of a brawny miner was taken for Macneil and Barry Limited, a managing agent with interests in coal, tea, shipping, jute and cotton, which eventually evolved into the Williamson Magor Group. Ali was an accomplished studio and portrait photographer, and this is evident in the masterful lighting of the miner’s image, in conditions which couldn’t have been less favourable.