Mahadevan, S. (2025). Still photography in the cinema: Identity and selfhood in Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960) and Laapata Ladies (2024). Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 17(2), 139–152. https://doi.org/10.1386/safm_00104_1
This article attends to still photography in two Hindi movies from India hinging on similar themes of unascertainable identity and misrecognition, Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960) and Laapata Ladies (2024). The article employs available histories of photography in South Asia, and ethnographies of photography in everyday life in contemporary postcolonial India, towards a reading method that attends to the role of media in shaping plot, event and character in fictional worlds. In this way, the cinema, the article suggests, emerges as a vital and imaginative record of the actual and possible lives of photography.