Food, Photography and the Indian Pastoral

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between Kheti Badi-a series of images produced by photo-based artist Chinar Shah based on the online Facebook game FarmVille-and the contemporary context of image making, agriculture and food production. In today's digital culture, global perceptions and expectations of food stuffs are grounded less in first-hand knowledge than in images and digital video that circulate on the screens that are now everywhere around us. While photography continues to act in the role of an instrument used to record and classify, it has the power to feed back into the very processes through which science and technology shape food production, going far beyond producing images of a reality that is already out there. In the intersections between a multinational food industry, the global circulation of images of food and the predicaments of people farming the land in India, the author discusses the significance of Kheti Badi's conceptual investigation of photography's role in shaping perceptions of, engagements with and modifications to food.