Bangalore, Karnataka, India,
Movie poster painters: synopsis
By Joseph Khakshouri Corbis

As Bangalore takes giant leaps and bounds towards progress, some industries are being left behind. Hand painted movie posters are an example of a slowly dying industry of mass communication being over taken by electronic printing processes. It has gone so far that poster painters sell their incredibly physically demanding works at a lower price than the machine printed ones, in order to remain competitive. As a result, their livelihood is becoming a labor of passion and frustration, rather than a viable source of income.
The local language of Karnataka, Kanada is a very small niche of the Indian film industry also referred to as Bollywood. Most Kanada films are mostly of the action genre, which is diffused by a lot of dancing as well as the occasional love story. Heroes are represented by gigantic cut out posters in front of Bangalore theaters, which are in turn garlanded by die-hard fans. Bangalore is also a hot bed of the increasing desire for “progress”, which in turn makes the end of gargantuan hand painted posters a very close inevitability.
One of the oldest poster painting companies in Bangalore, Rajkamal Arts, still provides most of Karnataka with movie posters. K. Chinnappa, now sixty four, has been in the industry since he was nine years old, and is a respected Guru of the craft. Together with his son C. Gopalkrishana they manage and work in and out of Rajkamal Arts studio. Cinnappa is the Guru (teacher) of most of the film poster painters in Karnataka, and still to this day, at the age of sixty four, paints at his studio nearly every day. It would seem to the outsider that there is an over abundance of work for the father and son venture and their associates and apprentices, however they have been forced to shift the location of their studio five times, and are preparing for a sixth. These shifts have become increasingly frequent for several reasons, not the least of which is financial.
I have taken the task of documenting the work of these artists as a long term project. The photographs are being shot digitally, as well as with a panoramic film camera. The explosive colors characteristic of Bollywood films are captured vividly on these two media. I tried to avoid the bursts of paint from becoming a distraction to the story at hand, and in so doing am creating a visual document of their hard work.