Rachna Chopra and Quasar Thakore-Padamsee

“Rachna’s first round of submissions seemed to capture the role of the book around the festival in a surprising, poetic, and beautiful way,” says Quasar Thakore-Padamsee, co-director of Tata Literature Live! “Her work seemed to look beyond the ‘goings on’ at the fest, and she became the ‘eye’ of the attendee, seeing authors and books from afar, in interesting compositions. In a weird way, just as the spirit of Tata Literature Live! is to bring the written word to life through interesting and engaging conversations and discussions on stage, her photographs captured the spirit of the literature lover, being surprised and excited by finding readers in abandoned stairwells, or an arrangement of books, or the joy in a fellow audience member’s face.”

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For the final photo essay, Chopra spent around three months going around the city visiting some of its oldest libraries like the library of The Asiatic Society of Mumbai, the JN Petit Library, the David Sassoon Library, The People’s Free Reading Room and Library in Marine Lines and the Marathi Granth Sangrahalaya and exploring the culture around books from paper markets in Bandra and Bora Bazar to second-hand booksellers in Matunga. “Literature is not just for the elite. It is all inclusive. And so, I wanted to explore what the locals of Mumbai were doing. None of the photos were staged. That required a lot of looking around, a lot of just being at the right places,” she tells us. 

The impulse behind the Tata Literature Live! Photography Fellowship, Padamsee says, was to combine two passions—the love for the written word and the love for the visual frame. “However, we weren’t looking at simply capturing writers and books. For us, the fascination was the literature lover, the ‘fan’ of literature—who steals time away to attend a session by their favourite author, or furiously tries to finish a novel before they get to their train station, etc.” Chopra’s photographs, he admits, “evoke the motto that ‘Anyone can read... anywhere’, “a perfect encapsulation” of what the festival strives to encourage.