Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose, Bhattacharya Shantanu

In this book, images serve both as the primary objects of interest and a narrative device. The cover plot interrogates the veracity of photographs - the way they are used as indices and evidence of a persons existence in spatio-temporal reality. These images are staged in variously contrived scenarios, often taking cues from the several utilitarian subsets of twentieth-century photography-the wedding portrait, the convocation photo, the vacation/holiday photo, candid snapshots, product advertisements-as though taken by different fictional photographers using different image-making aesthetics, techniques and formats appropriate to the time/place/visual cultures that those prototypes historically belong to. Referring to the genre of historiographic metafiction, fictional text and visual elements based on real events and characters are introduced to enable this found archive assume certain characteristics of a hoax.