There is a word photographer Rohit Chawla returns to again and again when describing his life’s work: trespassing. For the first four decades of his career — shooting prime ministers and film stars, artists and authors, for the covers and inside the pages of the country’s most prestigious magazines — he used to feel “lucky to be able to meet a particular actor or writer”. He was the interloper with the camera, grateful for whatever the subject chose to reveal. But something has shifted. “Now, at this stage of my life,” he says, “I look back and feel that I belong in this whole thing. Now, I can chronicle my own life rather than trespass. I still use portraiture to get to know the artists and creatives I admire more closely.”

This almost melancholic observation informs his latest book in subtle ways. Portrait of an Artist, published by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and co-published by Mapin Publishing (₹2,500), brings together 67 portraits of Indian artists spanning generations and mediums — from S.H. Raza and Akbar Padamsee to Bharti Kher and Shilpa Gupta, from the late masters Tyeb Mehta and Bhupen Khakhar to younger painters such as Kulpreet Singh. The text, crystalline and unencumbered, is by the art critic Kishore Singh.

The photographs are Chawla’s, except in the case of those he could not meet. And the method, as ever, is spare: no assistants, no artificial lights, no rearranging of spaces. “Most of the images [in the book] were just me and the artist one-on-one,” he says. “There’s no other person in that room.” That solitude, he believes, is what makes honesty possible, and increasingly rare.

In an era of relentless image management, when every magazine cover passes through a retoucher’s hands and every artist has learned to perform for the lens, Chawla’s instinct is to strip the encounter down to something closer to a conversation. He is, he acknowledges, something of a psychoanalyst with a camera. “Having spent almost four decades behind it, it gives you a peculiar kind of tunnel vision,” he says. “The camera holds this power — whoever is opposite, a prime minister, Robert De Niro, Vikram Seth, they all become human.”

Looking for calm

The book’s architecture reflects the ambition of the project, one that began almost accidentally when Chawla shot Anjolie Ela Menon as Frida Kahlo in 2010. It is divided into two halves, the portrait and the studio. Together they form an argument: that the working space of an artist is not a backdrop but a text, as legible as the work itself. As Kiran Nadar writes in her foreword, “The studio is never merely a room. It is simultaneously sanctuary and battleground, meditation space and laboratory, refuge and prison.” Chawla’s photographs make this visible.

Some, like Amit Ambalal, Akbar Padamsee, G.R. Iranna’s studios, are replete with the sort of magnificent chaos you’d expect of an artist’s private creative space — full of paints, brushes, canvases and easels. But they always signify something about the artist’s process or worldview. The silence that Surendran Nair thinks art demands is reflected in the clean geometry of his studio. Nilima Sheikh’s “beautiful, clean” studio underlines her quest for “sukoon [calm]”, in mild contrast to her partner Gulammohammad Sheikh’s space, where he finds home, surrounded by his books, brushes and paints and a film projector. Arpita Singh works in a cordoned off area in her living room; Jyoti Bhatt paints from his dining table. The range is the point. No two studios, like no two practices, are alike.

Mithu Sen, painter, provocateur, self-described possible witch, lives and works in a studio in Surajkund in Haryana that seems to embody her contradictions. Open rooms lined with what Singh calls her “Museum of Unbelongings”: shelves packed with dolls, busts, a dildo, a mermaid skeleton, breasts in various sizes, playing dice, dried leaves. Sen herself holds it all loosely. “If someone says, leave this studio, I can — without looking back,” she says. For Chawla, this is exactly the kind of portrait that resists the curated self, the performed identity.

Then there is T. Venkanna, the Hyderabad-based painter whose canvases of corporeal bodies and lurking violence place him in a lineage with K. Laxma Goud and Ravinder Reddy. When Venkanna returned from Vadodara to Hyderabad in 2023, he built his home inside his studio, folding kitchen and bedroom into the workspace as though the idea of leaving it were fundamentally incoherent. “My mind as well as my soul reside in my studio,” says the artist. “It means everything to me. I think twice before leaving it to go out on work.”

Some of the book’s most indelible images belong to artists who are not among us, including Ram Kumar, Manjit Bawa and Tyeb Mehta. Their inclusion, rather than diluting the project, deepens it. As Singh writes: with their studios now silent, these portraits function not just as documentation but as memorial — the preservation of something essential about how they worked and thought. Archival photographs, in some cases taken by others, fill the gaps where Chawla’s own lens could not reach.

Chawla is not shy about what the book is not. It is not a survey of current art-world fashions; it is not a celebration of the provocateur or the conceptualist whose practice requires a curatorial note to stand upright. “Any work which can’t stand on its two legs and requires a curatorial note,” he says, “to my mind is sheer nonsense.”

Shooting 300 authors

Chawla, who now lives and works out of a “sparse, minimal” studio in Assagao, Goa, is completing a book of portraits of 300 authors for the Jaipur Literature Festival, to mark 20 years of JLF, to be published in 2027. He came to authors, he says, out of intimidation: he used to feel daunted by writers, and the portraits were his way of learning to see them clearly.

He is also planning, with a group of photographers, what he describes as India’s biggest imaging festival, an event partly in tribute to the late Raghu Rai, whose death prompted an outpouring of affection that confirmed what Chawla already believed: that people still hunger for photography with “form and content and poetry”.

In a moment when artificial intelligence can generate a plausible image of anything, the argument for the photograph as a document of human interaction, of human life, becomes both more urgent—and more difficult to make. Chawla makes it anyway. “A photograph only has value if it is real,” he says. “If something actually happened.”

The Mumbai-based independent journalist writes on culture, lifestyle and technology.