Showing posts with label Footpath Bookshop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Footpath Bookshop. Show all posts
Mumbai
Announcement
Mumbai Paused Digital Photo Books are now available
on Amazon (for Kindle Reader)
Check them out here
Aarey Road
Where do children play in Mumbai, the city without playgrounds?
Find out in my photobook documenting space in the city through the play of children and with words by Mini S Menon.
Shivaji Park
Dalit literature or books.
Bookshops are an important feature at any Dalit party event. On 23rd February, BhaRiPa led by Dr Prakash Ambedkar had a rally with ally AIMIM in Shivaji Park. This was the mobile bookshop from Kalyan that was selling books at the event. Here, browse through their titles and have a look at the titles.
Footpath Bookshop from Mumbai Paused
Happy Republic Day!
You can now get my digital photobooks for Rs 71.
When I started the Footpath Bookshop, my idea was to distribute my digital photobooks for free. That is the reason I called it the footpath book shop. The reaction from the photographers I know was not very supportive. They said that I am ‘kicking them on their stomachs’ by giving away my hard work for free.
The second book I made was priced at Rs 100. This time, the photographers told me that it was priced too low. That’s the reason the later books were priced higher.
However, I am uncomfortable with charging too much for my book and today, on Republic Day I am bringing the price down to what I think is a comfortable price. It is the equivalent of US$ 1 these days or Rs 71.
After all it’s the 71st year of our republic.
BROWSE THROUGH THE FOOTPATH BOOKSHOP’S BOOKSHELF
Bandra
Govandi
The Hindu Sunday Magazine. December 2nd 2018
Digital photobooks
Mumbai Paused, now an Instagram handle, has over 24,000 followers, many of whom have followed him from other platforms. The loyal readership prompted him, last year, to start making digital photobooks. But he chose to bypass the conventional route: no exhibitions, no publisher, not even the well-known online retailers; just his photos, his text, his layouts, and his own site, footpathbookshop.com.
The Internet lets you make and sell things, Gopal says, so why not? He wants to destroy conventional publishing. “They are gatekeepers who will not talk to me. You need to be of a certain background, a certain college, a certain community.” Later, mellower, he says, “I don’t blame them: there’s no money in it unless you’re a famous photographer. Photobooks are vanity projects. If you’re a full-time photographer, it becomes your calling card; even if it doesn’t sell, it gives you a name. I don’t need that, because that’s not my job.”
He likes down-playing his identity — most people don’t know the name and face behind the handle, he says — and his skills. He still uses a point-and-shoot, and says, “I’m not a photographer photographer or a writer who writes. I’m just a copywriter, a blogger who takes street pictures.”
The smell of fish
The books are rooted in the blogs where, over time, themes sprout. “I find a pattern, put a hashtag to it, and continue.” Five such e-books have coalesced thus, with photos from his bank plus a few shot for particular books: Plastic People explores consumerism; Vishwakarma documents work; The Ghost of Good Things is about how children play in a city with no space; Aam Artist Gallery is the art of workers; and Mumbai Turmeric is about the Pochamma Panduga festival celebrated in the Kamathipura precinct (the last is free, the others cost ₹100 or ₹350).
And he’s just launched Matsyagandha, which means the smells of fish, which Gopal thinks is the odour that underlays all the other smells of the city. (It is also, he says, another name for Satyavati, a character in the Mahabharata, and the name of an express train that runs down the Konkan coast to Mangalore.) The book tries to pull off a difficult ask: capture olfactory impressions through visual cues. There are fish, of course, fresh, rotting, drying, salted, cooking. And also the smell of work, of worship, of a disappearing past threatened by spaces, of rain, rivers, rust, and rot.
Future books are germinating in the hashtags: #RedRemains, #DalitBlue, #SaffronTide, #IndianMale, #TreesOfMumbai. Or maybe not. But they will about this city; or if life takes him elsewhere, other cities. “Wherever you go, migration to the cities — the city story — is the biggest story in India.”
Mahim
Matsyagandha - Low tide smells of the island city.
The digital photobook from Mumbai Paused is now available.
Versova
Happy to announce the lauch of the latest book from Mumbai Paused. It is inpired by the smells of Mumbai and is called Matsyagandha.
It is available here.
Sunday Midday has this to say about the book: "New photo book to mark the pitstops for a Mumbai olfactory tour."
\Here are three images from the digital photobook.
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