In India, an Artist Revives the Legacy of a Small-Town Photo Studio

Abhishek Khedekar grew up by the sea. For most of his childhood, his hometown of Dapoli—which clings to India’s western coastline, about 125 miles south of Mumbai—felt like a precious secret. Flanked on either side by mountains and the Arabian Sea, the town was once a British army camp; today, it’s a beloved regional tourist destination, replete with coconut trees that tower over the graves of colonial officers. Dapoli offered a limitless canvas to a young Khedekar, who spent countless afternoons exploring its verdant expanse with his friends. He didn’t know it back then, but the images of home formed in his boyhood would inspire a search years later. The resulting series, Dapoli, Lost and Found (2018–ongoing), is a portrait of a place and time, and an attempt to reconjure the latent magic of childhood—to see more clearly what was, and what perhaps still may be.

Khedekar knew he wanted to be an artist from an early age, and also knew that he’d have to leave Dapoli to make that happen. At eighteen, he moved to the city of Pune to attend a fine arts university, where his interest in drawing and performance evolved into a fascination with photography. While cameras were still relatively expensive pieces of hardware for a student’s budget, there were more photo studios in a city like Pune than in small-town Dapoli. A friend of Khedekar’s who worked at one allowed him to pick up some work during the day and experiment with the camera and lighting equipment at night. “I started by making passport-sized photographs,” he says. It wasn’t until his senior year, when his parents gifted him his own Canon DSLR, that Khedekar finally had the freedom to push his photography forward.

As he gained confidence in his pictures, Khedekar enrolled in one of India’s most prestigious art and design schools, the National Institute of Design (NID), in Ahmedabad, for a master’s degree in photography. “This was where I started learning more about the history of photography,” he says, “and what my notion about it could be.” If it’s true that we must leave a place to understand it better, Khedekar carried Dapoli with him wherever he went. He returned home a few times to photograph it, but it wasn’t until his thesis assignment that a framework began to emerge. 

Central to the story of photography in India is the small-town photo studio, where industrious photographers, who more often saw themselves as operators rather than artists, captured generations of life—photographs for weddings, birthdays, school enrollments, job applications, matrimonial ads, and death certificates. In the clamor for iconic images and image-makers, the work of these studio photographers has largely been forgotten. NID encourages students to uncover this history, and to find previously unknown photographers, often from their own hometowns, to document. This is how Khedekar found Subhash Kolekar, who ran a beloved studio in Dapoli and, for some time in the 1960s, was its only photographer. Khedekar found traces of Kolekar’s photographic imprint across town: in family albums and on living rooms walls, in newspapers and police reports, and even as scientific illustrations still held at the local university. Kolekar rarely kept his own negatives and prints, but his archive was woven into the larger fabric of life in Dapoli.

While he’s still decidedly the author of Dapoli, Khedekar channels his older counterpart throughout the series (Kolekar died in 2018). One close-up portrait of a young Mallakhamb apprentice mimics an image from Kolekar’s archive of another boy of similar age, seemingly carved into the silhouette of a flame. In other instances—as with Coconut Milk (2018), Jackfruit (2018), and Dryfish (2021)—Khedekar attempts to recreate Kolekar’s scientific and instructional imagery, linking it to his own upbringing in their shared hometown. The photographs in Dapoli don’t just follow their predecessor’s visual blueprint, they embody its unrealized possibilities. What might have happened if Kolekar had the means to pursue his own artistic vision of Dapoli?

Khedekar now lives and works in Delhi, and often takes on commercial and editorial work. Most recently, Loose Joints published his debut monograph, Tamasha (2023), in which he follows a nomadic troupe of Dalit performers that he first saw as a child. The work in Dapoli is ongoing. “I’ve been photographing a lot of the old houses,” he says, “to focus on how quickly my sleepy, sensitive town is changing.” Despite their soft, temperate patina, Khedekar’s photographs are haunted by a double vision—of two photographers separated by time and circumstance, and of one separated from his own childhood by memory and distance. Homecomings are a tricky business, charged with both warmth and alienation. As the scholar Homi K. Bhabha once wrote about returning to his native Mumbai: “Your person divides, and in following the forked path you encounter yourself in a double movement . . . once as stranger, and then as friend.”

Abhishek Khedekar is a runner-up for the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.