Raj Bandyopadhyay | Owner, Photographer, Series A Photography
- Raj is an owner and photographer of Series A Photography.
- He was earlier a data scientist and a software engineer.
Podcast
Overview
Who doesn’t like to be photographed? Well, all of you might have had instances when you didn’t feel confident to pose or have friends who are hesitant to get photographed. Besides the personal choice, there are several other reasons impacting the choice, a lot of them being perfect body, skin color, etc. In today’s episode, we discuss the stereotypes that the photography field has set in the world and how artists can step in to change the narrative.
[00:40] – About Raj Bandyopadhyay
- Raj is an owner and photographer of Series A Photography.
- He was earlier a data scientist and a software engineer.
- He is a B.Tech in computer science from IIT Bombay, and a Ph.D. from Rice University.
[01:00] – Why do you believe that photography has an inclusion problem?
- Think of the term model or supermodel. I am going to guarantee you that when you think of someone who looks like a model, there is something very specific that probably comes to mind and if I may mention further, it’s probably someone who’s young, very fit, very thin, very flexible, and most likely very light-skinned.
- That already shows that we have some ideas of what it means to be a model or what it means to be somebody who is photogenic or worthy of being photographed on the camera.
- You might think that’s only for fashion, but what we see is that fashion shows up in every part of our life.
- I often hear this from my clients at an individual level when they feel that their skin tone is too dark to be photographed or when they believe they need to lose weight.
- There are various ways that it shows up in our everyday life in our heads, and I think that’s a problem that photography has created over time.
- A camera is just a machine that doesn’t care what you look like. It’s all the stereotypes and prejudices that we humans impose on the camera that causes this.
[06:46] – Where do these exclusionary biases come from?
- There is a fantastic New York Times called “The Racial Bias in Photography” that came out a few years ago, but I’ll summarize some things from there.
- The first photograph that was ever taken or the known photograph that exists is from 1827.
- It was a French photographer and since then, photography as a craft is about 200 years old, but it’s only been accessible to the general population for maybe the last 50 to 60 years because of cheap cameras and now smartphones, but before that, you had to have a lot of specialized knowledge and equipment.
- For most of the History, photography has been the domain of wealthy people, particularly wealthy men and globally speaking wealthy white men.
- You can imagine what kind of preferences they might bring to photography. They might have a preference for certain kinds of bodies, subjects to photograph, ways of seeing the world.
- That is probably the foundational bias in photography which in turn is actually inherited from Renaissance painting because photography was developed in France and Europe the traditions of portrait photography painting in the Renaissance got transferred to photography and that Discord perpetuity throughout the world.
RESOURCES:
You can connect with Raj Bandyopadhyay – LinkedIn
Visit: https://www.seriesaphotography.com/
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Profile
- Raj is an owner and photographer of Series A Photography.
- He was earlier a data scientist and a software engineer.
- He is a B.Tech in computer science from IIT Bombay, and a Ph.D. from Rice University.
