Culture of the Streets

Maqbool Fida Husain was a master of all mediums including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and filmmaking. Early in his career, the artist supported himself by painting billboards for Indian films, which later informed his iconography and style as well as the ambitious scale of some of his paintings. In the 1980s, these billboards also became a direct subject for Husain. Armed with a 35 mm SLR camera, Husain roamed the streets of Chennai to capture images that juxtaposed the surplus of the streets of a major Indian metropolis with the fantasies these billboards were selling. The result was a portfolio of thirty-two photographs offering Husain's unique vision of modern life in India. Showing these large scale cinema billboards with the pedestrian activities that took place beneath them highlighted stark contrasts between the rich and glamorous world of cinema and the urban landscape. These photographs capture just one aspect of the complex reality of a country steeped in tradition yet struggling to define a modern identity.