Shailabh Rawat was born in 1958 in the state of Uttarakhand, in India. He lives and works in New Delhi. Since their launch in 1988, he has been responsible for Photo Fictions in the monthly Madhur Kathayen [Beautiful Stories], the first popular magazine in India to publish erotic photographic comic strips. Initially in black and white with a Hindi text, they moved to colour in the 1990s and have been appearing in an English-language version in Crime & Detective magazine since 1992.
Madhur Kathayen has a print run of 100,000 and since each copy is read by some twenty people, it has an estimated readership of two million. This, however, isn’t the kind of reading material you take home: you buy it at the station before catching your train, and on arrival you sell it to a news vendor who then puts it on his second-hand rack.
Initially Rawat did the whole thing himself – writing, storyboard, directing, photos and layout – but now he has a team that turns out five or six episodes of Photo Fictions, working nonstop for a week in studios in New Delhi and Mumbai. Taking his inspiration from news items, Rawat uses stories to illustrate social issues: sex, alcohol and money predominate, with regular doses of adultery, lies, blackmail, revenge, humiliation, prostitution and murder. Taking care not to overstep the mark, Photo Fictions has never had the slightest problem with the censors. The only episode ever to have caused any controversy was one dealing with a male homosexual relationship, in 1994. Reminiscent of the Bollywood aesthetic, Photo Fictions draws directly on Indian popular culture in its handling of themes which are at once local and universal, common and taboo, and highly revelatory of a society unafraid of paradox; a society that assimilates its contradictions as part of its process of self-construction.
Olivier Culmann, curator
Text from the catalogue-book “Photoquai”, co-edited by Musée du Quai Branly- Actes-Sud
