Avinash Veeraraghavan’s I Love My India:Stories for a City (2004) caught my attention while I was looking for photography from India. Avinash Veeraraghavan is a young graphic designer who runs a design studio in Bangalore, India. He trained under and went on to work with the Italian designer Andrea Anastasio.
I Love My India is a visual journey through Indian cities from a rare non-western point of view. A witty and original account of street life, kitsch and popular culture, it combines the eye of the ironic insider with that of the curious traveller. The book moves through the spaces and signs of the city — both imaginative and physical — commenting on the complex and often surreal forms of human arrangements.
© Avinash Veeraraghavan
© Avinash Veeraraghavan
© Avinash Veeraraghavan
© Avinash Veeraraghavan
Using digital cut-and-paste techniques, he ‘collected pictures from all over and reconstructed an imaginary, generic city’, resulting in a campy Indian city. India is often photographed (I think most places are anyway) and one could easily conjure up streets of milling human mass, the smiling street urchin, beggars etc. Taking a more light-hearted approach to how India is portrayed, I think that Veeraraghavan’s approach is refreshing.
More images from the book here. Read an article on him here. Eye Magazine interviewed him back in 2005 [I really need to catch up on my research!].
I Love My India: Stories for a City is available on sale at Amazon
Kix ass
this is the lamest ‘book’ produced by tara so far. ‘lame’ is a huge understatement here. and of course the silly ‘lamer still’ matchbook is even worse. this is how the publishers are ‘dumbing down’ for the audience i guess? i wonder how much does this avinash interact (even at just a pathetic pseudo ‘cerebral level’) with the architecture that his book/photographs/book sleeve annotation pretend to suggest? if i’m not mistaken these photographs are taken from other sources and ‘collaged’ here for lazy and lame aesthetic pleasure. “runs a design studio”? i would like to see a real validation of that statement! ha ha! and who the hell is andrea anastasio for our notice? this is by far the worst book ever to be published by an indian publisher.