Enter, tastefluencer: The rise of a curator economy

In the era of content overload, a set of ‘extremely online’ people have emerged as content ‘curators’, trying to perfect the art of selling their taste for cash or clout

Digital content is endless, tipping us into meaningless scrolling, addictive behaviours online and eventually, content-consumption burnout. A growing tribe of users is now stepping in as curators of this unwieldy world. (Illustration by Kokila B. for Mint Lounge)

(Co-authored with Shephali Bhatt)

People get thousands of likes on their wedding posts. Abhay Arora gets as many on a post about a wedding playlist. Last week, he uploaded a carousel post on his Instagram account, @thatmusicproject, featuring clips from nine popular wedding songs in Hindi and Punjabi. It fetched over 20,000 likes. His cheeky caption pegged itself to the viral news of the moment: “Leaked wedding playlist for Kiara and Sid’s big-fat Indian wedding.”

A few rows below, he has another playlist—a curation of songs that would appeal to 1960s youngsters, 1990s youngsters, and everyone in between. He captions this “Hey (with the intention of)”, a meme-play on a phrasal template that mocks our tendency to use “hey” when we have an ulterior motive for initiating a conversation. He has 45,000 likes for this.

On paper, Arora, 23, is a hotel management graduate from Delhi. On the internet, he is a popular playlist curator. He first started curating mood-based playlists on social media three years ago, as a way to pass time during the early days of the pandemic. Today, studios and streaming platforms regularly approach him to curate playlists to promote key characters from their forthcoming movies and shows for his 300,000 Instagram followers. He has a verified profile on Spotify with close to 18,000 listeners for the 20 curated playlists he has uploaded there. From clubbing to the monsoon to after-midnight blues, he has them covered for every mood.

Arora has made a name for himself as a digital content curator, joining a new tribe of online users who have, over the last few years, swept in to solve an ever-growing problem for anyone on the internet: too much content, too little time. This subset of content curators is taking shape within the creator economy. In a world where most of us passively doomscroll, they actively consume heaps of content to pick out shiny, worthy items to share with the rest of the world. They use the same tools for distribution and monetisation as their creator counterparts and deal with the vagaries of the algorithm much like every other creator, too, all while competing with the same creators for digital ad dollars.

For, whether it is in the ceaseless chatter of articles on magazines, news sites and Substack, or in keeping track of all the releases in a specific genre of music or books this quarter, it is an overwhelming task to sift through it all to find something that makes it worth your time. So people are increasingly acknowledging the need for legitimate, skilled curators, and are even willing to pay if they find value in their curation.

In 2018, roughly 20,000 songs were uploaded every day on music streaming sites like Spotify. Today, that number has increased fivefold to 100,000 songs a day, according to data collated by Music Business Worldwide, a London-based publication covering the global music industry. During the same period, the number of podcasts across platforms has gone up 10 times, from 500,000 to five million, according to multiple reports. Unesco, which keeps tabs on worldwide literacy, estimates that the global publishing industry brings out approximately two million books every year. The self-publishing revolution ensures that the numbers are far higher. To top it off, almost everyone and their brother runs a newsletter now.

In such a scenario, “a curator is like a friend with great taste that you depend on to help you figure out what’s cool and what’s not,” says Lavanya Mohan, a social and content marketing professional. “The content curators I follow spend time thinking about what to put together instead of giving an instant hot take. That draws me in,” she adds. Mohan is a paying subscriber for curated newsletters across interests ranging from economy to fashion. One of them is called Things Of Internet.

Started by Deepak (aka Chuck) Gopalakrishnan, a content and marketing professional, Things Of Internet has close to 500 paying subscribers— ₹400 for a month or Rs. 2,500 for a lifetime subscription. One-tenth of his subscribers have opted for the lifetime option. In the three years since it started, his newsletter format has evolved from offering just one marketing case study to including a dump of good reads often related to the theme of the newsletter, in addition to opinion pieces.

In the podcast Pivot, which Scott Galloway co-hosts with tech journalist Kara Swisher, the author and marketing professor says: “Consumers don’t want more choice, they want to be more confident in the choices presented.” Curators are able to fill that need gap for consumers, explains Gopalakrishnan.

“You would notice that some of the best-performing threads on Twitter carry curated lists of best podcasts, books, the works,” says a product manager, who did not wish to be named. She has worked with social media platforms. “People are looking to hear from a voice of authority to navigate the information overload,” she adds.

*****

For a brief period in internet history, the word “curated” was associated with the pressure of having a picture-perfect social media feed, a mood board of sorts projecting the lives we wanted people to believe we led. But as digital content exploded and social media displays moved from careful curation to mindless “shitposting”, the word gained a more positive connotation. Today, “curated” on the internet implies “distilled” and “decluttered” more than “deceptive”.

The idea of human curators of digital content is not entirely new. During the early 2010s, when online-native content was not yet king and trolls weren’t lurking everywhere, a few international curators had shot to fame. Their success was predicated on their novelty factor. Think, most famously, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings (now renamed The Marginalian), a compendium of posts that connected excerpts from books, letters and other oddities, which started in 2006. Or Danielle Krysa’s The Jealous Curator, a blog and later Instagram account which describes itself as a way of “turning jealousy into get-your-ass-back-in-the-studio inspiration”.

Launched in 2009, Krysa’s blog led her followers to discover a range of lesser-known artists. She has 277,000 followers on Instagram now but in the first decade of the new millennium, when Artificial Intelligence wasn’t yet as sophisticated (or intrusive), it was the intrinsic value of her effort, in providing an avenue of discovery, that made her a curator to follow.

Back then, Popova would describe Brain Pickings as a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness”. Today, the emphasis on “human” in her description cannot be overstated. Human curators are in demand even as social media and content platforms train their algorithm to create a “For You” feed.

Spotify, for instance, applies a lot of machine learning and its own editorial curation to facilitate artist discovery. Yet, “one of the biggest paths of growth for many songs and new artists actually happens through user-generated playlists”, says Rahul Balyan, head of music at Spotify India.

Ananth Talam, 28, has witnessed this first-hand as an amateur playlist curator. The digital marketer from Hyderabad made an account on Spotify when it first launched in India, in 2019. “It was hard to find songs of a particular mood or by specific (regional) artists back then, so I started creating playlists…initially just for my cousins and me,” he recalls.

Soon, friends and acquaintances would ask him to suggest songs to play on road trips or during parties, and, a little while later, his playlists began to gain traction on Spotify. Talam has even had young, fledgling artists express gratitude for, and appreciation of, his playlists, while others would message him on social media platforms requesting that he consider including their new songs.

Back then, Talam did not think this was something he could monetise, and he never tried. Newer curators, however, are more confident in the possibilities of monetising a combination of their taste and skills. For instance, Anurag Minus Verma, a podcaster and multimedia artist, recently launched four “premium” curated playlists of rare songs on Patreon, a membership platform that helps creators monetise their content. Each playlist can be accessed for a fee of $5 (around Rs. 400). Minus Verma noted that his social media followers frequently made Spotify playlists out of the rare songs he shared on his Instagram Stories. Given the time and effort he put into discovering new sounds, he thought it was only fair that genuine fans paid for this curated experience. “I have been getting new subscribers on Patreon since then but I provide a lot of content on the platform, so I can’t exactly tell how many are there only for the playlists,” he says.

With such players, curation isn’t only about finding a cleverer way to package already-made content. Curators quite literally forage in the deep woods of the internet to find just the right song, article, poem, piece of art that will make their effort worth paying for. This involves hours upon hours of work and years of practice.

Gopalakrishnan has been hunting for, and compiling, marketing case studies since 2009, when he first started working for a digital ad agency. Talam says he listens to songs for at least eight-nine hours a day (a full workday) to allow himself the space to discover music; Arora says it takes him anywhere between half a day to three to just put together one playlist.

The effort shows. Balyan at Spotify acknowledges that user-curated playlists have also helped identify new trends and tastes. “Genres like lo-fi…actually came about by users adopting them first (into their playlists), the artists taking cognizance of it, and then labels stepping in,” he says. Only then did “the whole machinery kind of kick in”, he notes, adding that close to 200,000 user-made playlists were created on Spotify every single day last year.

Platforms like Spotify also benefit from turning consumers into curators as it gets them to spend more time on the app, one of the determinants of an app’s popularity. There’s another benefit too: “Even though most social media and streaming platforms have an in-house curation team, manual curation is not seen as a priority function at these companies,” says the product manager quoted earlier. “When layoffs happened at some of these places, the majority of their curation teams were wiped out,” she adds.

User-led curation is, therefore, now necessary in more ways than one. “Companies are realising that their curated content flywheel can only go so far. Especially with plateauing audience growth. They need to create and empower enough curators and creators out of the consumers to keep this flywheel of high engagement and consumption going,” adds the product manager. For instance, Spotify not only allows you to follow other users’ public playlists, it also enables collaborative playlists—where a user can invite many other users to add and modify a single playlist with them, in a bid to encourage group curation. Platforms like Substack also allow other newsletters to be recommended to subscribers and encourage creators on their site to double up as curators.

*****

While content curation remains a side hustle for most members of the curator economy, it has helped them build their brand as subject experts and even fetched them lucrative jobs. During the first wave of covid-19 in India, Ankit Kumar, a 24-year-old tech professional, started a WhatsApp group called Random Internet to share interesting articles he found on the internet with other similarly enthusiastic readers. He built the group into a community of 15,000 members in two years and was regularly approached by brands for promotional campaigns. Within a few months of starting Random Internet, Kumar was offered a job at his current workplace, a creator economy monetisation company—its founder happened to be part of the same WhatsApp group and noticed his skills. He discontinued the group late last year owing to lack of time. “But I still get messages from members asking me to resume (it),” he says.

Curation isn’t only about finding a cleverer way to package already-made content. Curators quite literally forage in the deep woods of the internet to find just the right song, article, poem, piece of art that will make their effort worth paying for. (Illustration by Kokila B. for Mint Lounge)

Perhaps the best example of a curator’s outsized influence in a certain domain is that of Rohini Kejriwal, who runs a curated art newsletter called The Alipore Post. She regularly conducts poetry and zine workshops with a good turnout and is offered art direction projects, all because of the newsletter she started eight years ago, much like Krysa of The Jealous Curator had, when going through a low phase in life.

Kejriwal started The Alipore Post in the pre-Substack era, as a space to collect, hold on to and share art (visual, textual, musical) that resonated with her. In 2015, she took to Facebook to ask her friends if they would be keen on receiving a mailer with poems and art that spoke to her, inviting them to share their email ids with her on DM. Less than a year into the project, she crossed 500 subscribers and was forced to move her then daily newsletter to TinyLetter, a service which, unlike Gmail, allowed her to send out emails to more than 500 people at once. In its current weekly avatar, with over 9,000 subscribers, The Alipore Post now runs on Substack.

Thanks to its sustained popularity, “today almost 50% of my annual income comes from The Alipore Post adjacent projects,” says the 31-year-old curator from Bengaluru . She sells The Alipore Post merchandise and annual calendars. Her eight-year-old curatorial project is now “an extension” of her, she says.

When tastefluencers like Kejriwal curate a list of book recommendations—themed and pegged to festivals, notable days, and, most popularly, end-of-year round-ups—on Instagram, Twitter, or Linkedin, publishers see a marked uptick in organic traction towards the books featured. Industry insiders say that while there is no direct, causal way to establish the exact sales figures or revenue from a tastefluencer-led push, their recommendation or testimonial of a book—when included in its marketing campaign as a blurb in print or a quote on e-commerce sites like Amazon—helps drive up rankings. Its position on the Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales, also sees an improvement.

On condition of anonymity, a book sales professional notes that “each influencer has a different effect on sales, so it’s hard to establish an industry average...but it is clear that when a curator-influencer is not included in the overall marketing strategy of a book, whether at a publisher level or a book-store level, it takes longer to push it.”

This is also in line with what Aastha Verma, digital lead at Penguin Random House India, says when she notes that exposure through online curators “allows us to measure the success of a book in different, non-immediate terms”. She adds that “while working with influencers for book publicity campaigns, we put in a lot of effort into understanding whether (a particular candidate) should do a review, share an extract, or curate (a list)”.

That companies in various fields are seeing curators as a legitimate way to cut through the clutter and get the word out on something is a testament to their growing importance in the larger creator economy ecosystem. Despite the strides they continue to make, platform algorithms are still not able to satiate our growing need for content tailored to our taste. “Because algorithms are usually heavily trained on data sets from the West and may not show relevant content to users in, say, a country like India, which is a top 3 market for most global consumer internet companies now,” says the product manager quoted earlier. “Further, if you are a light user of their app, you give fewer signals to the platform to train its algorithm into giving you that ‘aha’ moment to keep you coming back for more,” she adds. Curators can make up for that too.

Human curators also bring an element of surprise, says Arora of @thatmusicproject. “I often get an ‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting this song in this playlist’ in response to some curations,” he says. An algorithm may optimise for curating currently popular songs within a genre but Arora may include long-forgotten gems too. “That really impresses them,” he adds.

It’s not all rainbows and butterflies, though. Sometimes, content curators tend to intentionally “gatekeep” the good stuff. In some cases, it’s an engagement strategy. For instance, Arora says he avoids adding a particularly fitting track into a mood playlist at times to elicit a “how could you miss *that* song!” reaction from his followers and increase engagement on a post. Occasionally, he also faces the wrath of his audience for not gatekeeping enough.

Last week, a user hate-commented under one of Arora’s Instagram Reels because he used Hum Jab Door Ho Jaenge, an obscure song by singer-songwriter Osho Jain, for the visuals of the song Tere Liye from Veer-Zaara (2004), featuring Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta. “I was gatekeeping this song, I hate you so much *angry red-face emoji*,” the user wrote. With their influence in shaping people’s taste in music, curators can expose an “unsullied” song to the mainstream internet: an organism hungry for fresh melodies which can be mutilated to serve a bottomless pit of trending audios for short-video-sharing platforms.

The FOMO (fear of mainstreaming out, in this case) is real. Kumar of Random Internet say he has been gatekeeping a blog he discovered recently because he worries that if the writer is discovered by more people, their motivation to write may change. “When you have a huge audience, you start thinking about the number of people who are giving their time to you and that can create unnecessary pressure,” he says.

*****

The curator economy, then, has emerged as a small but strong part of the creator economy. Since it appears to the unacquainted that they don’t really create anything from scratch, it might be tempting to give this subculture the status of a “second-class citizen” in this space. However, not everyone can dream of breaking into the curator economy.

A low entry barrier formed the centrepiece of the creator economy’s growth story. The curator economy, on the other hand, is tough for a fresh curator, unless they have a completely different point of view or something unique to offer consistently, says Gopalakrishnan. To produce one pay-walled newsletter every week, for instance, he reads several pay-walled articles himself, spending close to a lakh on premium subscriptions every year.

Individual content curators also have to contend with the lack of adequate monetising opportunities, or at least those on a par with creators. “Typically, brands will pay curators 40-50% of what they will pay a creator with the same following,” says Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, CEO of Qoruz, an influencer data analytics firm. Brands don’t see them as key opinion leaders but as “resharers”, he notes. “They are seen as an alternative to creating an ad and boosting it on Instagram. Even the number of deals they get is very low compared to creators with the same following or even lesser in the same domain,” adds Bhuvaneswar.

There’s another competitor curators have to keep in mind: aggregators. “While individual curators have the freedom of expressing their opinion through their curation, aggregators, which are effectively ‘lite’ media organisations , tend to have more money and hands on deck to ensure consistency of output,” notes Subrahmanyam K.V.J., (SuB8u on Twitter), who works for a global consulting firm in Mumbai and runs a weekly tech newsletter, Curated Commons.

The curator culture also treads murky territories when it comes to copyright and disclosure labels. “If I am the author and the owner of the content, I have multiple rights under the Copyright Act, like the right of reproduction, public performance, adaptation…. All these rights get impacted when my content is curated on the internet,” says Abhishek Malhotra, an intellectual property rights lawyer and managing partner of TMT Law Practice.

“Broadly, authorship rights are covered if there is proper attribution. But if the curator makes commercial gains, my ownership rights come into play,” he says. In general, there is also a lack of understanding of copyright law and a lack of enforcement of rights on the part of the author/owner, Malhotra notes.

Additionally, content curators (much like content creators) may also not always disclose sponsorship deals upfront while recommending something as part of a curated list, notes Shweta Mohandas, a policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). Or they tuck it away almost unnoticeably, towards the end of a post. This makes it difficult to trust them.

“Also, there’s a veil of anonymity with a curator since you don’t see them, you don’t know who the person is…,” she adds. In addition to the trust factor, this brings two more distinct issues. One is that a curator loses out on any parasocial relationships that creators who show their faces and lives to their audiences tend to have with their followers, says Mohandas. The second, according to Arora, is that curators end up making less money than creators because they lack “face value”—“I know creators…get a lot more (because of said face value),” he says.

There is mettle to curation though, Mohandas notes. Seen in the larger context, the one lasting advantage is that curators can continue to bring to their audience the-best-of very many different things, whereas genre-specific creators can run the risk of their shtick getting outdated.

This is exactly what Arora picks up on. When asked if his family worries about a “more stable career”, he is not frazzled. “They are quite okay with it… (I am) earning well at 23 and that’s what they want right now. They feel like kuch na kuch toh karlega (he will do something or the other).” Arora is confident: With release after release of “shows, movies, series, and also releases by indie artists…there is just so much going on right now”. He knows his curatorial intervention is not only required, but also loved. It is pretty much his way of saying “hey” (with the intention of “curator economy is here to stay”).

This was first published as the cover story in Mint/Mint Lounge on 18 February, 2023

The appeal of analogue photography

Tired of digital, film-photo enthusiasts in India are coming together to bring back shooting slowly and with intent

The movement towards rediscovering analogue photography has gained significant traction in India over the last few years (Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

There aren’t too many like him around, and he knows it. Especially when dealing with a persistent, hopeful customer: “Okay but, ek aur baar try karoge? Ya koi aur hai yahan jisko ek aur baar yeh dikha sakoon? (Try again? Or maybe there’s someone else I can show it to?),” the customer asks, not wanting to give up on the analogue camera that once belonged to his father. The man facing him smiles patiently. The bright white of the tube light overhead bounces off a shiny black badge on his left front pocket. “KIV ENGINEERING. I AM KIV,” it reads.

“Leave it with me, I will check when I have time and call you,” Kiv, aka Kapil Inderjeet Vohra, replies. With this kind of client, half the job consists of offering assurance. The camera in question is, after all, a 30-year-old Pentax K1000, a mechanical, manual focus, single-lens reflex (SLR) camera that uses 35mm film.

There are many such amateur photographers with second-hand or heirloom cameras seeking out Vohra, a 40-something service-person at Chandni Chowk, Delhi. He has been in the trade of repairing cameras for close to two decades, catering to hobbyists as well as professionals with high-end digital gear. With very few stores and workshops taking on SLRs for repair currently, he has become popular with the Capital’s growing community of film-photo enthusiasts.

“Bilkul ek leher si aayi hai (it’s like a wave),” Vohra says, referring to the resurgence of analogue photography. Over the last two-three years, he has noticed that while older professionals are bringing in old analogue gear to sell, young people seem to be wanting to buy vintage cameras. Just a few days earlier, someone with a 40-year-old Nikon FM2 came to Vohra, wanting to sell the camera body, its kit lens, and a flash, for Rs. 22,000. “And there are people willing to spend this much—and more—on old non-digital cameras,” he says.

*****

A search for #filmisnotdead on Instagram reveals close to two million posts worldwide. On Tumblr, another creative blogging platform, there are 929,000 followers for this hashtag, with hundreds of accounts focused on shooting and sharing analogue photographs. On YouTube, tens of thousands subscribe to analogue photography tutorial channels run by the likes of King JVpes, Matt Day and Kyle MacDougall.

This movement towards rediscovering analogue photography, which has gained significant traction in the US and Europe over the last few years, has seen a remarkable surge of interest in India too, especially with young people.

“We have seen a strong increase in film photography in the last three years in APAC (Asia-Pacific),” says Clara Low, business development manager at the Singapore offices of Kodak Alaris, the British company that now partly owns the Kodak brand along with the American Kodak Eastman Company. “For consumer films, (the) interest (is) from a younger demographic, 18-26.... For pro photography, it is more niche and users are typically older, (in) the 30s-40s....While the increase in interest is not as strong as consumer films, (professional) films’ demand has been holding steady in the market for the past few years.”

We were already becoming screen-weary, hopping between digital devices for most activities through the day, before covid-19 hit—the pandemic only exacerbated this exhaustion. So it’s not surprising that a longing for tactility and tangibility during this time coincided with an increased interest in the full analogue shooting experience.

The last two-three years have seen film enthusiasts across the country coming together, more than ever before, on Instagram accounts, Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups to swap and sell devices, and trade tips and tricks. They have sustained a steady conversation and sparked commercial interest in analogue photography, making it easier than it was even a decade ago to understand the charm of analogue shooting. They are making a strong case that it might be interesting, and not cumbersome, to actually spend time framing a shot and having a basic understanding of how light can affect composition, feeling the metallic-but-warm sounds and physical feedback of a shutter snapping as it captures an image, than shooting rather blindly on a digital camera's “automatic” mode.

“There’s a huge resurgence in film photography, and it has come about five years too late to India,” says Varun Gupta, photographer and director of the Chennai Photo Biennale. “I think the challenge here for a long time was that there wasn’t film, or chemicals, available easily. There were no distributors, and the existing ones were winding down.”

In 2015, the Kolkata-based photo lab Eastern Photographics started bringing Ilford black and white film stock to India. In 2017, the Chennai-headquartered Srishti Digilife jumped in to become the official distributor of Ilford in India, adding Kodak’s colour films to their inventory in 2019.

Looking at a roll of film at Prabhu Studios; (in background) various film stocks, including the Kodak Portra, stocked at the store (Courtesy Prabhu Studios)

“It was not a commercial decision for me,” says R. Vijayakumar, director and group CEO of Srishti Digilife, which he started in 2007. “It's an emotional decision. We wanted to give back to the film community in India,” he says, specifically referring to those who continued shooting analogue despite a transformation in technology over the past two decades. It was also a way to “inculcate the habit” of creativity in young people, he adds, as analogue shooting requires you to be more mindful of what you actually shoot.

It was around the same time, between 2017-19, that communities too began to mushroom, especially online. Gupta calls these spaces—like Film Shooters India on the messaging app Signal, Analogue Resurgence and Project Hybrid Shooters on WhatsApp, and Film Photography India on Facebook, with over 5,500 members —“hotbeds of activity”. Here, members buy and sell film and cameras, organise independent photo walks and workshops, and share and discuss each other’s photographs. Close to 500-600 messages, all focused on analogue photography, are exchanged daily on these chat groups, says Gupta, adding that “the sheer volume of content exchanged on these platforms is a great indicator of a thriving ecosystem”.

Smaller businesses like The Film Lab India, which operate through a Whatsapp Business account, have also made it easier to try analogue. As soon as you open a chat with them, you can see their catalogue, which includes film stock from Lomography and Kono; vintage cameras from Minolta, Yashica and Cosina; and film processing and scanning services. Instagram accounts like The Vintage Collectibles source, repair and check vintage cameras for quality before transacting over Google Pay or other UPI channels.

Brick-and-mortar camera and electronics stores across cities like Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru have also started stocking film again.

*****

Raghuvir Khare, 29, first tried shooting with a film camera in 2016. Once he started using the Nikkormat FT that he bought at a thrift store in Chandni Chowk’s Kucha Chaudhary camera market, “there was no looking back”, he says.

When Khare moved to Prague for a graduate degree from the Czech Republic the next year, the availability and relatively cheaper prices of film rolls made it easier for him to keep learning and experimenting with film photography. Before returning to Delhi, he stocked up on bulk-bought 35mm film. Whenever he needs a new roll, he cuts and re-spools the film at home, working with a portable darkroom changing bag.
Over the last year, Khare has also begun using film rolls from the shop at Museo Camera, a museum and gallery dedicated to the photographic arts in Gurugram, Haryana. The space sells Ilford, Ketmere and Kodak stock; the growing popularity of such film means they are often out of stock.

To cash in on this demand, some smaller stores have even been selling expired Fujicolour C200 rolls with new use-by date stickers slapped on. Unlike Kodak and Ilford, Fujifilm doesn't have an official distributor in India; it has also been gradually phasing out its film stock. The results of an expired film roll can appeal to a certain aesthetic sensibility but there’s no guarantee it will develop at all.

The film processing ecosystem overall continues to remain patchy. Till 2021, when she was based in Chennai, Vidhyalakshmi Vijaykumar, 27, would courier rolls to the 50-year-old Prabhu Studios in Bengaluru to get them developed. She has since moved to Bengaluru but says that “even now, many photographers who shoot film in Chennai send their rolls here”.

“Even five years ago, we were barely getting any films for development,” recalls Dinesh Allamaprabhu, a photographer and the son of Allamaprabhu H.N., the founder of Prabhu Studios. Over the last three years, however, their studio has been getting “easily about 800-1,000 rolls a month”, including outstation orders, “even from (non-metro) cities like Nagpur, Kanpur, and some rolls even from north-eastern states like Assam and Mizoram”.

Today you can always find labs or individuals who will process film rolls—be it photographer C.P. Satyajit’s Dark Room or Adyar Photo Lab in Chennai; Rama Color or Siddharth Photographix in Delhi; Zepia Studio or Color Lab in Thiruvananthapuram; Idea Creative in Mumbai; or individuals like Abhinav Karhale in Nanded, Maharashtra. But analogue enthusiasts say operations in terms of an overall network of labs, tends to be haphazard and the quality—of the processing and the digitised scan—inconsistent.

In many labs, it’s usually either an older staff member who takes up the few film rolls they receive, or the store outsources processing. Many a time, labs wait till they have an adequate number of rolls, to process them together and efficiently use the potency and quantity of the chemical stock. Some even use old processing kits if there is no option, compromising the quality of the image.

So it can take a week to 10 days—or up to a month if the roll is sent to another city—before you can see what you clicked. The experts contrast this to cities in the US, UK and Europe, where the turnaround time at most labs, thanks to adequate demand and supply, is a day.

UK-based Giles Branthwaite, sales and marketing director at Harman Technology, which owns Ilford Photo, details how they have attempted to help. “We continue to introduce new products designed to make film photography easier for the person wanting to try it for the first time. In recent years, this has included...easy to use sachets of the photochemicals, starter kits and recently, a pop-up darkroom for those not able to visit a more established darkroom near their home.” India, he maintains, is an important market for them, with great potential for growth as interest in analogue photography takes hold.

Global logistics hit by covid-19, though, continues to throw a spanner in the work of the passionate and burgeoning analogue community here. Stocks that met demand through the early pandemic months are only being replenished slowly, creating a shortage and driving up costs.

“The pandemic hasn't just presented a logistical challenge in getting inventory into India, it has also thrown up a manufacturing challenge for companies as the raw material costs consistently kept going up. They had no choice but to keep increasing the cost of the product,” says Vijayakumar.

Currently, a roll of film on which you can take 36 pictures starts from Rs. 500 for the more common Kodak ColorPlus 200. Add processing costs, at about Rs. 300-500 per roll, scanning, at another Rs. 500 per roll, courier costs for those whose preferred labs are in another city, and each analogue photograph you take can cost approximately Rs. 30-50. For some who prefer to scan their developed rolls at home and convert the negative image using software like Adobe Lightroom —not very hard to do—the process is slightly cheaper.

*****

Despite the hurdles, however, analogue shooting has become a peaceful, centering activity for many young people. For one, analogue cameras do not overwhelm you with buttons, modes and on-screen menus. All they require you to know—but know well—are how the basics interact: the light sensitivity (or ISO) of the film you are using, the speed you are setting your camera’s shutter to, and how much of the lens aperture you are opening.

This makes them perfect to cater to the desire among millennials and Gen Z-ers the world over to be more mindful, slow down. “With digital, (shooting) can be done faster than I can think it. But film photography works at the same pace that I work. It works better with the frequency with which I assimilate thoughts,” explains Khare in Delhi.

Gupta says this is “almost like a psychological reversal”. In spite of shooting professionally on digital cameras for over 15 years now, he says he is “fatigued” by his digital images. “I think universally...there is a desire for something tactile, for something that has value.” At the core of this belief is the idea that a digital photograph, whether taken on your phone, a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, does not require you to stop and think before you shoot. Incidentally, mirrorless cameras, one of the developments in digital camera technology, are all modelled to look more or less like 35mm cameras.

Aditya Arya, director of Museo Camera and a commercial and travel photographer for over 35 years, says he has always believed that film photography is about “pre-visualisation and perfection”. The ease of digital technology lets the shooter get too trigger-happy to photograph with thought and intent. “People always say ‘we can fix it in post’,”Arya says, shaking his head, referring to the now common almost-joke with photographers that any mistakes can be set right in post-production—on a computer, on programs like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. For mobile photographers, there are the mobile versions of these apps, in addition to scores of others, like Snapseed or VSCO, which help enhance and beautify photographs—sometimes to unrecognisable degrees.

Veteran photographer Raghu Rai agrees. He says the proliferation of digital technology has encouraged a penchant for shooting endlessly, without valuing and thinking through each shot. “It’s a disease,” he says, and “while even colour film used to exaggerate things a bit, I think that digital—oh, it’s exaggerating everything devastatingly.”

Rai loves shooting on his digital devices, though. Since he switched to digital, sometime in the early aughts, he has never looked back. He says, however, that photographers like him, who have shot analogue for decades before moving to digital, have an edge over digital natives because it has embedded “the rules and spirit of photography” in their practice.

For followers of this school of thought, there is a silver lining, despite the stock and processing hurdles. While new analogue SLRs aren't easily available any more—Nikon discontinued the F6, its last SLR camera, in 2020 and only Leica still produces two models, costing upwards of Rs. 3 lakh—sturdy, pre-used analogue cameras are affordable and easily available. Devices that were immensely popular in India in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have found their way back into the hands of those in online analogue communities, and to offline, unorganised flea markets, in a big way. A basic Yashica is available for Rs. 2,000-3,000; a manual Nikon F series or an Olympus OM 10 for Rs. 8,000-10,000. Depending on who is selling, in what working condition, and the power of the haggler, prices can be lower.

*****

This gives vocal members of the analogue community hope. If it was the older labs and photographers who tried to step in pre-covid and help by acquiring distributorships, now young analogue enthusiasts are moving in. Indie photo labs, for example, have begun buying branded film in bulk, cutting and re-spooling it into smaller cannisters and rebranding it as their own. This helps cut film and processing costs. And since companies like Kodak or Ilford allow for a reseller market, this has become an imaginative way, in India and abroad, to bring down costs and diversify image results.

A portrait of Vidhyalakshmi Vijaykumar; of Sarbajoy Paul working in his darkroom; and a couple rolls from Zhenwei Film Lab. (Credit: Akshaya Vaidyanathan, Santanu Paul; Courtesy: Zhenwei Film Labs)

For the hurdles in getting affordable film had begun taking a toll. “We have noticed how (people) who got into film enthusiastically over the last few years have recently started giving up now because they can’t afford (film) any more,” says Yash Yeri, 26, a Mumbai-based photographer and co-owner of Zhenwei Film Lab. Yeri and his business partner, Aditya Tawte, 25, started selling a line of repackaged and rebranded black and white film stock a couple of months ago under the Zhenwei label. Their three varieties are made from re-spooled Ilford stock: Yuma, with 50 ISO; Sin City, with 1000 ISO for nighttime; and one called You-Name-It, a professional T-Grain film, 320 ISO.

In Kolkata, Sarbajoy Paul, 28, too has a line of rebranded film. His stock differs from Zhenwei’s in that Paul buys Kodak film stock that is used to shoot cinema, or motion picture, in bulk and adapts that for use in still photography. Inspired by the Kolkata-based movie industry, Paul’s line of film is called Tollygrunge, and has three variants: Noir is black and white; Colour is for daylight; while Neon is a tungsten balanced film meant for night shots. Between March-July 2021, at the peak of his business, he “was moving roughly 300-400 rolls a month”. Then, his scanner broke and he had to get a new one; he is now trying to regain momentum.

Many of these boutique labs have come up with custom in-house processing methods for their rolls, becoming end-to-end solution providers for what becomes a captive market: You buy film rolls from such a lab because at Rs. 350-400 a pop, they are less than half the price of a common Kodak 200; you also take it back to them to process, since only they know how to develop their roll in a way that achieves the results expected. Yet processing and scanning together cost Rs. 300-600, half of what older, mainstream labs will charge.

*****

In spite of such efforts being spearheaded by those under 40, Srishti Digilife’s Vijayakumar believes that “youngsters lack patience” to keep up an interest in analogue, and that “despite the growth we have seen over the last three-four years, there's a decline we are expecting will happen over the next five years”. He estimates that 80% of the community is actually between the ages of 45-70.

In the meantime, however, this impatient younger lot continues to drum up noise around analogue photography. Globally, demand has gone up for Fujifilm’s Instax cameras, which result in Polaroid-style pictures that develop right in front of their expectant eyes. The devices achieved screaming levels of popularity, with Fujifilm even collaborating with global pop icon Taylor Swift, now 32, to launch a special edition in 2018. According to a report by the German broadcaster DW (Deutsche Welle), Fujifilm only sold under half a million Instax units worldwide in 2010; in 2020, this jumped to a staggering 10 million units.

The appeal lies largely in the soothing tones, artsy light leaks, and texture-lending grain that film results in. Many try to mimic these results in digital photographs too, through the indiscriminate use of filters on editing apps. In the premium version of the popular app VSCO, there are filters that achieve the exact tonal qualities of various specific Kodak, Ilford, Fuji and Agfa Vista films.

“Whilst there are many people who remember film photography from the first time round, the growth we are seeing now is being driven by 18- to 35-year-olds who are learning about film photography for the first time,” confirms Branthwaite. “Often this is from being taught the basics...in a photography class, and increasingly the interest it sparks continues. We are also delighted to see the increasing interest from mainstream retailers, a further sign of the resurgence moving into the general public’s mindset.”

Over the last few years, some wedding parties of millennials in India have also offered point-and-shoot disposable film cameras (Ilford and Fujifilm are popular) to guests—they could shoot pictures through the events and leave the cameras behind so that the rolls could be developed later for add-on albums. In Kolkata, Paul, whose commercial projects include wedding shoots, says the photographers he has worked with would also offer to shoot an album entirely on 35mm as an add-on premium package for clients. Matt Parry, marketing communications manager at Harman Technology, points out that in 2019, Ilford even featured leading Indian wedding photographer Ankita Asthana capturing a wedding on their black and white film.

Some young fashion photographers, too, have been exercising their artistic discretion to shoot parts of their commercial assignments on film. Ashish Sahoo, 33, analogue photographer and founder member of Maze Collective, a Delhi-based collaborative space for photographers, cites Sarang Sena, a photographer in his mid-30s, as an example. In July last year, Sena, who has a 17-year career across editorial and commercial work, had posted outtakes from a shoot for the designer duo Shantanu and Nikhil on his Instagram account—all these pictures were shot on a medium format camera, which uses a 120mm film roll.

A portrait taken with the Nikkormat FT, with Kodak Gold 200 film. (Credit: Raghuvir Khare)

With hobbyists and amateur film photographers, however, it is the 35mm film and camera that is popular. This is the crowd that participates in the film processing workshops Sahoo runs at Maze. “Very few professional photographers come in—it’s all kinds of other people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who want to learn. It’s about a kind of intimacy with the image they are making from scratch—understanding the basics and shooting, and then watching it appear in front of their eyes” as they learn to also work with the chemicals and develop an image, he adds. This is in line with what others, such as Arya at Museo Camera and art and photo-focused studio spaces like Kanike Studio in Bengaluru, which run such workshops, have noticed.

Longer-duration workshops, which take on interested students and practitioners, are also being organised. In August 2021, the not-for-profit MurthyNayak Foundation funded The Analogue Approach Project—a Delhi-based initiative, set up in 2020—to select image-makers every month to spend time under the guidance of photographer Srinivas Kuruganti. These “Darkroom Workshops” ran till the end of January, with practitioners studying and refining their analogue photo, printing and processing skills. Kuruganti hopes to hold more such workshops.

Over the last two decades, the proliferation of DSLRs helped to make learning photography more accessible, simply by virtue of giving the shooter immediate feedback. With film, the time between shooting and seeing the photo had made the craft that much tougher, and the learning curve steeper. Now, however, having been through point-and-shoots and DSLRs, a lot of those born into, or those who grew up at the cusp of, a digital-first world are seeing the inclusion of analogue formats in their practice as a way to shoot better.

“Film has helped me grow as an artist,” says Bengaluru-based Vijaykumar. “With digital, it’s easy to get trapped shooting one frame a bunch of times,” but with film, you know that you have only 36 exposures on one roll, and you become intentional and careful, to (use them well and) shoot variety,” she says. “Once I saw the output of my first roll, I was stunned…film has helped me see better, it helped me look for things.”

Mint Lounge, issue dated 26 February, 2022. Cover photo by Vidhyalakshmi Vijaykumar

*****

The current moment is really a make-or-break one for the fledgling analogue film photography community in India. Regardless of age, those shooting film agree that this isn’t a fight for film to replace digital—that’s just not practically possible, nor is it necessary or desired. The idea, instead, is to have a stronger and more stable ecosystem of film shooting.

The lobby for film internationally is a strong one— Hollywood directors like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino had made movie studios agree to sign contracts with Kodak in 2015. According to reports, these were renewed as recently as 2020, ensuring a continued supply, to a certain degree, of both cinema and still-photo stocks.

In India, with the increased interest and activities—in learning, shooting, processing and innovating—members of the analogue community are trying to stay the course and not lose steam in streamlining, and perhaps scaling, their operations. Eventually, the goal is to force film and camera companies the world over to take note of this interest and need.

“There are reasons for (such) experimentation and effort that have to do with the sociopolitical moment that we live in,” says Rahaab Allana, curator and publisher at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts. “It’s not just about art and craft at the end of the day, it’s about how we are experiencing the world around us, what we see happening, and how we would like to change that,” he says. After all, art—given that it offers different ways of looking at the world, quite literally so with photography—is a motivator for change.

This was first published here. It was the cover story for the Mint Lounge edition on 26 February, 2022

Where is the big covid-19 novel?

Events of a certain scale and magnitude have always shown up in literature, influencing not only subject but form. Will covid-19 similarly affect the novel?

When she answers my call, Mita Kapur is sending off an apology email to a writer. She was to write back about their submission nearly 12 weeks ago but has not had the time to get to it, prompting a reminder from the writer.

It’s not as if she has been on a break. Kapur, who heads Siyahi, one of India’s leading literary agencies, has been reading more than ever: “We are all frantically reading, all the time,” she says. It’s just that her organisation has seen an almost fivefold increase in the number of submissions. Ever since covid-19 sent people into forced lockdowns and isolation, literary agents and publishers have been inundated with manuscripts from writers who have finally had the time to work on their novels.

Especially before the second wave of the pandemic hit India in the summer of 2021, many of them took the opportunity to hunker down and work on old, half-finished drafts. Yet others thought it was time to seize the moment and channel their fledgling ideas into dystopian fiction or medical thrillers.

Along with the first flurry of isolation-driven submissions, all sorts of writing gathered steam online. Instagram poetry flourished. In prose, the online writing platform Wattpad saw a surge in subscribers. In late 2020, its country head, Devashish Sharma, told Scroll.in that “from January through April, the number of new stories grew 151%. In the same period, the number of new writers increased by 125%. Writer activity, overall, increased by 200% from January through April. In India, these growth trends meant a 50% increase in reading time, a 30% increase in new stories, and a 60% increase in writers.”

But there is still no big covid-19 novel. Is it too early to expect one?'

“Let’s look at it like this,” says Namita Gokhale, who came out with her 20th novel, The Blind Matriarch, this September: There were no Partition novels till a few decades after the event. “It took that much time to process (it). World War II is still a (very) good subject to write on. And every time we go into World War II, we find more and newer dimensions, or aspects of the war that were overlooked at that time or brushed over. I think that this pandemic will recur in fiction, perhaps with greater depth, in the years to come.” Rahul Soni, executive editor (literary) at HarperCollins India, echoes Gokhale’s observations. “It may take 10 years to address the pandemic (in fiction) in any significant way, or with any depth,” he says.

Expectedly perhaps, the first movers in the traditional publishing spaces were in non-fiction. They were mostly the scientific and explanatory kind, about disease outbreaks and viruses, specifically about the coronavirus. One notable Indian title was The Coronavirus: What You Need To Know About The Global Pandemic by Dr Swapneil Parikh, Maherra Desai and Dr Rajesh Parikh, published by Penguin Random House India (PRHI). It came out as early as March 2020.

In creative writing, the pandemic started showing up first in poetry and short stories . The novel, even just by virtue of the length and approach to world-building it requires, was not even in the race. One of the first responders, so to speak, was Shobhaa De, with her short story e-book series, Lockdown Liaisons, published by Simon and Schuster—now, a year-and-a-half later, actor Lillette Dubey is adapting five of the book’s stories for the stage. Journalist and writer Udayan Mukherjee followed in October 2020 with his book of short stories, Essential Items And Other Tales From A Land In Lockdown, published by Bloomsbury—recently, it was longlisted for the Tata Lit Live Book of the Year Award.

The same month that Mukherjee’s book came out, PRHI had brought out a book of poems called Singing In The Dark, edited by poet and critic K. Satchidanandan and U.S.-based academic Nishi Chawla. It featured over 100 poets from around the world reflecting on what a crisis of such global magnitude meant. “We did realise that poets typically privilege a slow churning of their art, and that not many poets would embrace the idea of immediately responding to the pandemic as it is shaping and reshaping our lives,” the editors acknowledged in their foreword. This need for a “slow churn” applies also, and perhaps more so, to novels.

Currently, there is a sense that while novelists have begun engaging with the pandemic, both publishers and readers are not very open to books about it. “I am already representing two books that feature the pandemic, both are by well-known women writers,” says literary agent Kanishka Gupta, of the agency Writer’s Side. However, there is “major covid-19 fatigue”, he says. “Even if the treatment is fictional and creative”, such novels are being rejected by readers and, in turn, publishers. “Also, publishers feel like (a novel based on the pandemic) has a very limited shelf-life,” he adds. The uncertainty is in whether when things open up, and life regains a sense of normalcy, as it seems to be doing now, more newsy stories set in or featuring the pandemic years will still be of interest.

Inevitably, the recent months have seen a few prominent books directly or indirectly involving the pandemic. While Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch is primarily the story of a family and its various members who also incidentally experience covid-19 and its consequences, Puja Changoiwala’s Homebound, launched this month by HarperCollins, takes a more granular, newsy approach—it situates itself in the migrant crisis of 2020 to tell the story of a family based in Mumbai’s Dharavi, forced to head back home to their native village in Rajasthan following the nationwide covid-19 lockdown. Last week, PRHI announced that it would be publishing popular writer Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s next book, Soft Animal, “about a young couple enduring an unhappy marriage just as India embarks on its surreal COVID lockdown”. The book, Madhavan’s eighth, will be out in 2023.

Through this all, though, an ambivalence about the quality of pandemic-influenced submissions lingers. “A lot of people are addressing the pandemic itself but that’s almost like just doing something timely to make a submission,” says Poulomi Chatterjee, editor-in-chief and publisher of Hachette India. “To me, nothing else has changed otherwise…. I haven’t yet seen a change in what (authors) are submitting, or a change of form in literary or commercial novels,” she adds.

Barring novels that have featured the pandemic largely in the background, like Gokhale’s, the general consensus is that any attempt to write a “pandemic novel” any time soon may see only superficial and not very well-considered results. It would be as bad as some hastily put-together drafts “swapping out a fascist regime for dystopia as a trope”, notes one publisher. A chunk of the drafts agents and publishers have been inundated with in recent months have tried this tack.

At Siyahi, however, swimming in a sea of submissions, Kapur is already seeing a slight change in the very way the novel is being written. “There is a coincidence (of the pandemic years) with a generation of writers who are willing to experiment. The very physicality of the situation—there has been loss, grief, paranoia, and emotional suffering on so many levels—is bound to impact the way you think, imagine, dream and the way you plot your next move,” she says. The change may not be “ubiquitous”, Kapur adds, “but I can assure you that there will 100% be an experimentation with voice, in character development, and in the way a story arc develops. I am seeing all of this in a few of the books that have come to me, and it’s quite fun to read.”

When the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and World War II started to inform novels written in English, these were the very elements through which the form began to change, ushering in Modernism. Today the novel, which Soni calls “a shape-shifting, accommodating form that’s not dying any time soon”, is possibly seeing glimmers of such change again.

This story was first published in Mint Lounge on 27 November, 2021