Tamasha is a 2023 book by the Indian photographer Abhishek Khedekar, published by Loose Joints and edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon at the Loose Joints Studio. The book’s proper subject is not simply a performance genre but the social life that sustains it. Tamasha, a travelling form combining dance, music and visual art, has roots reaching back to the 1800s; in post-independence India it was increasingly stigmatised, polarised, and pushed to the margins. Khedekar follows a nomadic troupe of around one hundred Dalit families across Maharashtra, and he refuses the clean distance that the phrase “documentary photography” might imply. He works instead with archival material, collage, and reappropriation, alongside performance, sound, and video, building an experimental docu-fiction from images that move between factual record and constructed narrative.
The book is the result of Khedekar’s residency at Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, as the 2022 recipient of the Publishing Performance award, a residency and publishing prize given to work at the intersection of photography and performance. That context matters: the award supported both the production of the work and the design of the object, and the book is edited, designed and published by Loose Joints. Its eighty-eight pages hold seventy-five colour plates, and the physical object — a 220 × 260 mm cahier-bound debossed brochure — is modest in scale and deliberate in construction, matching the make-do attitude that the artist finds in the performance itself.
For collectors, the significance lies in what the book does with its documentary material. Where a conventional photobook might illustrate a subject, Tamasha insists on restaging the sensory texture of a performance culture: the instability of a travelling troupe’s life, and the unpretentious bricolage that keeps a tradition alive. This is an artist’s book in the strict sense, and its interest is formal as much as ethnographic. Khedekar, born in 1991 and based in New Delhi, trained in photography design at the National Institute of Design, and this is an early, ambitious statement from an artist working across photography, archive, and design.
