Paper short abstract

This paper seeks to map the technological moment of 1970s in India. Located in a politically volatile decade, I will try and infer the range of experiences that the arrival of analog video technology brought to documentary practice and the formative tensions it unleashed within it.

Paper long abstract

This paper seeks to present an experiential account of the arrival of video technology in India and trace its dynamic encounters with documentary practice. It will mobilize a discussion around documentary images, placing them in the wide range of sites such as surveillance networks, medical practice and activist narratives. The question of whether the political and technological climate of the 70s and the 80s fundamentally change the expectations from the documentary form, will be pursued through the piece. Finally, to be able to unpack various orders of meaning that were/are created in the interstices of industrial histories, experiences of watching, and modes of circulation; will be the central challenge of this ethnography.