Photo-Attractions

"""Ajay Sinha has woven a finely detailed tapestry of the social, personal and aesthetic allusions that contribute greatly to understanding and reimagining Ram Gopal's mystique and presence. This is timely, refreshing, colorful and a much needed intervention in our his-and her-stories around dance and the camera."" -- Uttara Asha Coorlawala * co-curator of Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance * “Sinha’s is an extremely luminous and well-researched project. It is also a beautifully written, deeply analytical, and entirely accessible book, narrated with verve, and a pleasure to read.”     -- Saloni Mathur * author of A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art * “This book arises from a thrilling pas de deux between a Modernist American photographer and an Indian classical dancer, in which it’s never entirely clear who is calling the shots. In deciphering the subtle aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual weave of these sessions, Ajay Sinha identifies a third partner in this elaborate dance, namely Van Vechten’s German-made Leica camera. This is an exhilarating book, intellectually compelling and visually mesmerizing. And the photographs are to die for.”  -- Christopher Benfey * author of Degas in New Orleans and The Great Wave * “In Sinha’s lucid, incisive analysis, we encounter a world of technological messiness and experimentation, cultural disparities, and new, transitional queer masculinities, all set against the backdrop of the twentieth-century reinvention of Indian dance and the complexities of Euro-American Orientalism. A timely contribution to the fields of both dance studies and visual culture studies."" -- Hari Krishnan * Wesleyan University, author of Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bha * “Sinha provides a remarkably rich account that does justice to the contact zone unearthed by his archival discovery. Both vivid and perceptive, Sinha’s prose grips from the start and unfolds three days in the 1930s into a marvellous larger panorama of representational practices, a broader inter-cultural landscape, and the intimacy of personal encounters.” -- Christopher Pinney * Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture, University College London * ""Photo-Attractions is the fascinating account, by a masterful storyteller, of a single extended portrait session that took place between Indian classical dancer Ram Gopal and photographer Carl Van Vechten in New York in 1938. Sinha’s cosmopolitan vision, deeply informed by histories of dance, gesture, performance and photography, offers brilliant new perceptions of trans-cultural exchanges of gender, sexuality and desire in the early twentieth century.  An illumination.""   -- Laura Wexler * author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism * ""With extraordinary finesse, Ajay Sinha reconstructs two remarkable artists’ collaborative fantasy-making through a Leica camera, which produced what he calls the 'photo-dance': a voluptuous intermedial object imbued with cross-cultural provocations. As much an astute commentary on Orientalism, postcoloniality, and race as it is an informed critique of the silences of established archival memory, this virtuosic study is a mesmerizing read.""   -- Rey Chow * Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Duke University * ""A trio performs: a beautiful male dancer of Indo-Burmese origins, a cult photographer with a Leica, the metal prosthesis that acquires a life of its own — 'photo-eroticism'. This expansively researched book with a non-linear structure has a discursive flamboyance. A historical moment spins into the contemporary; the language of the writer enthralls the reader.""   -- Vivan Sundaram * visual artist, founder and trustee, Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation *"