‘Sparseeing’ photobook | Joining the dots in Jamshedpur with Joyona Medhi and Abhishek Basu

Joyona Medhi met Abhishek Basu in 2015 when they interned together at The Caravan magazine in Delhi. Basu was the photo intern, Medhi the editorial intern. A few years later, a meeting with Varun Gazdar, owner of the Parsi café in Jamshedpur, where the two — now assistant professor at Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC, Delhi) and documentary photographer — were having coffee, would make them collaborators on a new project.

Gazdar handed them a box full of glass slides. These became the entry point to the photographic archives of the Gazdar-Bharucha family; and the world of Keki Gazdar, Varun’s grandfather, who was chief electrical officer at TELCO (Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company).

The pictures also included those by Keki’s father-in-law, Khurshed Bharucha, the first Indian cashier of Tata Steel, who had built the Bharucha Mansion housing a single-screen movie theatre called Regal Cinemas.

Sparseeing book cover

The archives became the photobook Sparseeing, which won the Alkazi photobook grant in 2022, and released last December (part of an accompanying exhibition at Offset Projects, Delhi). Sparseeing is not only a ‘fictive telling’ of the life of Keki, but also a record of the Parsi community in Jamshedpur, as well as a document of the rise of the steel city itself. But most of all, it is the story of a photographer in search of his vision.

A photo from Sparseeing 

As the exhibition travels to Cymroza Gallery in Mumbai in June, the photobook’s co-author Medhi decodes this new expression of the family archive. Edited excerpts:

Photobooks are usually the work of photographers, but you as a writer were a part of it from the beginning. How did you approach the narrative?

We did not want to make this a story about a Parsi family. We wanted the viewer to experience it in bits and pieces and to join the dots in their own way.

Keki Gazdar was a mechanical engineer in 1950s Jamshedpur, and he used to shoot his town, visits of dignitaries, like [wrestler] Dara Singh and [Prime Minister Jawaharlal] Nehru. If you’ve been to Jamshedpur, it’s a little like The Truman Show — things are too perfect. So, I wove it into the book as though Keki was trying to break from that kind of photography.

We found a diary of his, which he maintained on a cruise. He used to travel to different steel hubs like Birmingham and Brussels. In his travels, we see his photography evolving. It breaks from the straight lines and grids of Jamshedpur, to friends and family, having fun, experiencing new things. He loses his lens hood in Waterloo. There’s a bit in his diary where he’s going crazy about it. It’s symbolic of a man searching for his vision. We viewed it like that. We thought of him as though he’s sitting in his attic, going through his old photographs, and searching for his own language. That’s the narrative of the book.

How did Keki Gazdar emerge as the protagonist?

We’ve not consciously tried to say that this is about Jamshedpur or about Keki. It’s about photography evolving over time. To make it more relatable, we had the photographer link. We used every picture as a prompt for us to imagine what is going on in Keki’s mind; our voice is as important in the book as Keki’s.

Pages from Sparseeing 

There was a point in photography when looking at archives was new. Then everybody started to look at them. How did you navigate keeping the book fresh?

I’m a social sciences student, not much into history or dates. I’m not an archivist or restorer, so, when I first saw it, it was another Parsi family archive. Our intention was to make that interesting and relatable to someone like me. To make it cool, tactile, and also fictional, because then we step into their heads and wonder, why did he photograph this from this angle? Why did he have so much body portraiture? Keki had a bodybuilding obsession and there are a few nudes of him just posing in front of the camera, unusual for that time. There are so many pictures of parks, Dimna Lake. Why? This person was clearly obsessed. Our aim was to focus on his eccentricities.

‘Keki had a bodybuilding obsession’

You’ve said the book is fictive.

There was a lot of material. To make sense of it from the point of view of one person [in a diary form], we’ve had to join the dots. When people ask me, ‘What does Sparseeing mean?’ It’s to see from the point of view of the ‘sparse’ or to see from the point of view of fragments. To us, Keki comes out as the protagonist because we feel as though most of the pictures have been taken by him. But he may not be also. There might be another woman, a maasi of his. There’s one photograph of a lady signed ‘me’.

This is a kind of speculative history. Everyone’s image of a person is different. When I say fictive, every piece of fiction I’ve built, the way we’ve written it in our voice, is based on some snippet of information which Varun, his mother, or a relative shared. For most, Keki is a very serious man. To break that image and show a man [from Varun’s interviews] who loved swimming, new experiences, travelling, hosting flower shows, bravery awards, who was eccentric… We built that over time.

How did you and Abhishek work this book out?

We fought. We were very tired of photobooks where there was a lot of text and over explanation of things. We just wanted to make it about amazing pictures. Whenever we picked up a picture, we were like, ‘Whoa, this picture is so cool. Other people should see it.’ We selected a bunch of amazing pictures. After that, I started weaving the narrative. Once he sequenced it, it should flow like a diary. I took bits from the diaries and conversations, and integrated all of it. We went back and forth. I would write, he’d add a picture, we’d discuss what I had written. I made Abhishek add a lot of pictures which he felt wouldn’t go. He made me delete a lot of sentences which he felt wouldn’t go.

Page spreads from Sparseeing

Yours is one of the most accessibly priced photobooks at ₹1,290.

I’ve never bought books which are ₹4,000. I remember when I was in class nine, a Harry Potter book was ₹900 something and my parents were, ‘How much? Too much!’ Yes, a photobook is an art book, but the pricing is consciously done because I want many people to pick it up. It could happen because it’s supported by the Tata Trust, Alkazi Foundation, and Offset Projects. It’s educational, and we want as many young researchers, writers, photographers to pick it up. I want it to be dog eared and underlined and scratched and made your own.

The author is a photographer and writer.

Published – March 28, 2026 11:11 am IST