Important Notice

Part of a series titled 'The Native Types', this photograph, orchestrated and posed for by Pushpamala N., has been modeled after a 1970s Tamil film still of the actress turned politician Jayalalitha featured on the cover of the May 1998 issue of India Today magazine.

Shot against an elaborate set painted specifically for the purpose, the present lot celebrates the acts of production and reproduction. "Backdrop, lighting, perspective,... Part of a series titled 'The Native Types', this photograph, orchestrated and posed for by Pushpamala N., has been modeled after a 1970s Tamil film still of the actress turned politician Jayalalitha featured on the cover of the May 1998 issue of India Today magazine.

Shot against an elaborate set painted specifically for the purpose, the present lot celebrates the acts of production and reproduction. "Backdrop, lighting, perspective, color, texture, bodies, faces, clothing, hairstyle, posture, mood, are mimicked in the new media (studio/theatre set, photograph) with such fetishistic meticulousness that the production itself is foregrounded…Often – and not surprisingly – as artifact, and in terms of textural quality and gestural significance – the 'copies' are richer visual objects than the 'originals'…As citation/performance the photographs also gesture towards other everyday rituals of self-constitution and presentation…appraising one's mirror image against norms that are in circulation…These rituals are also the scripts and scenarios of the disciplined taking on/in the normative or regulative image of the self that is on offer (you can call it identification, interpellation, internalization, subjectivation – depending on the framework you are using)" (Susie Tharu, "This is not an inventory: Norm and performance in everyday femininity", Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs, Nature Morte, New Delhi, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, and Bose Pacia, New York, 2004-05, p. 15-16).

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