No coffee table book in recent time has been published that is worth buying. Publishing these have become sort of fashionable rather than informative in India. Even corporates have started doing their own coffee table books. The extensive research that a good coffee table book requires is missing. Photographers, bloggers, newspapers, publishers are launching these books but they lack appeal and zest. And in India, we see these books getting published very often, more than in any other country.
The worst is that I can’t recall any book looking at which I could say this has both vision and imagination and the person has captured something amazingly different or unique. And then, these are heavily priced sometimes even more than `10,000. The worst part is that they all look like refined versions of a tourist guide.
India’s Great Masters: A Photographic Journey into the Heart of Classical Music, a coffee table book by me was released recently. Much hard work went into researching and planning it. Besides, focusing on the musical styles of the 11 musicians, I also took pictures of them with their family and friends. These musicians’ traditions, gharana, style — all form a part of the book. It’s a documentation of their life and work, and author Ashok Vajpayee wrote a very sensitive and insightful introduction.
I feel there’s a lack of research in today’s coffee table pictorial books. Many publishers have invented a formula of collating a little bit of this and that and they come out with a shoddy book.
As told to Priyanka Bhadani