The grunge behind the glamour: What photographer Ketaki Sheth saw when she landed on a film set

The movie star Rekha is curled up on a sofa. She’s looking into the distance. When the eye manages to tear itself away from her, other elements in the photograph become apparent: lighting equipment, sections of a glass table, a table cloth, a bird cage.

In another picture, Poonam Dhillon is in a Chevrolet, a side window framing her smiling face and her braided hair. Dhillon is shooting for the Hindi movie Kasam at Film City in Mumbai. Low-rising ruins loom behind her.

“They look like anthills,” Ketaki Sheth told Scroll.

In Flashback, Sheth’s suite of photographs of movie shoots, glamour and grunge meet in striking ways. The behind-the-scenes views don’t just reveal how films get made, but also how their production might appear to observers.

Out of the melee of moviemaking, Sheth plucks out the faces and bodies of stars and extras, technicians and hopefuls. By freezing moments of intense activity, the photographs create new meanings and narratives about what might have been going at the point when they were taken.

Flashback is the title of a book and a recently concluded show in Delhi, both organised by Sheth’s gallerist Devika Daulet-Singh and her company Photoink. Sheth has previously published books on the subjects of Mumbai, twins, the Sidi community and photo studios.

The 57 black-and-white photos were shot between 1985 and 1993, at a time when it was possible for photographers to enter film sets and linger there long enough to pierce the veil of make-believe. This kind of independent, candid perspective on showbiz has all but vanished.

“It was a heady time, with unrestricted access to stars, sets, premieres and parties at a pace that was easy and unthreatening,” Sheth writes in her foreword. “Days seemed endless when we waited for the cameras to roll; at times, to a newbie like me, nothing seemed to stir until the call for: Lights! Camera! Action!”

We see actors within or between scenes, technicians holding lights or props, goggle-eyed fans. While most of the photographs are from Hindi films as they are under production, Sheth also visited Tamil movie shoots in Chennai, including for the Kamal Haasan-starrer Thevar Magan.

“The shoots were often chaotic and no one focused on me, which was a total advantage,” Sheth recalled. “Also, I wasn’t on assignment. I was really free.”

Bhanupriya combs her hair for a song in Pangali as background dancers in thigh-baring shorts watch her. Aamir Khan strikes a Rodin pose on the Andaz Apna Apna set. Smita Patil looks pensive on the set of Angaaray in 1986 (she died at the end of the year).

Some of Sheth’s subjects posed for her. Some were caught unawares. In an unplanned moment, Meenakshi Sheshadri, coming out of a scene for Shandaar, stares right at Sheth, seemingly still in character.

Still others forget that Sheth was among them, armed with a Leica M6 camera as compact and discreet as her. Jayaprada, who is in one of the photographs, remarked that Sheth’s camera looked “mamuli”, ordinary.

“The Leica M6 is the gold standard in photography, but it’s also small, unobtrusive, silent and unfancy looking,” Sheth said. “I remember thinking that being mamuli had its advantages.”

In addition to attending shoots, Sheth visited the actors’ homes. Chunky Panday is sprawled on a bed, next to a wall of his own photos and posters from his movies. There’s Shatrughan Sinha on a set, oblivious to the crowds around him, as well as at his house with his family, including an infant Sonakshi Sinha.

Sunny Deol sits on a chair next to his dog, a quiet smile and typical wariness in his direct gaze. Neelam tosses her long hair, Sheth visible in a bedside mirror. Unsurprisingly, mirrors abound.

Sheth is fond of a photo she took of Jackie Shroff during the Akayla shoot in 1991. Shroff’s face is hidden by a mirror in which Sheth can be seen at work.

In a stunning detailed photograph from Disco Shanti’s home in Chennai, the actress has her back to camera as she puts on make-up. The eye goes to the wallpaper, the bric-a-brac, a curtain fluttering at the edges.

“For those of us in photography, this is a Walker Evans image,” Sheth explained, making a reference to the American photographer best known for his images of the effects of the Great Depression. “In the images that Walker Evans shot of American homes, there is the same wallpaper everywhere.”

Since Sheth shot on film, there was little room for error. “With film, you can’t keep clicking away like you do in digital,” the 69-year-old photographer Sheth said. “The moment you were waiting for has gone and it will never come back. So you have to be intensely focused.”

One of the most fascinating photographs is from the Parampara set. Make-up artists and secondary actors are engaged in simultaneous activity. There is no central point, only a mesh of hands and faces. This photograph, like so many others in Flashback, invites viewers to pause, peer closely at every bit of the frame and notice the periphery.

“How you use the edges of a picture can also be interesting,” Sheth said. “There’s this half-head of the make-up man and his hands. And then there are these octopus-like hands and all these made-up faces.”

When Sheth took the pictures that eventually comprised Flashback, her artistic practice hadn’t yet come into view. She had returned to Mumbai in 1984 after studying photography at the New York University.

Before NYU, Sheth had interned at The Times of India, where she befriended the journalist Khalid Mohamed. In 1985, Mohamed was heading the Times group’s film magazine Filmfare. He asked Sheth if she wanted to accompany him on his set visits.

“Because of Khalid, I had no problem entering the sets,” Sheth said. “He used to be busy interviewing the stars. I had very fresh eyes. I had no preconceptions about anything. I had come straight from looking at the work of great photographers. I had all the time to roam around and see the actors, technicians and aspirants. It was just fantastic.”

One of the first things Sheth noticed about the film set was just how ordinary, tawdry even, it could be.

“It wasn’t very glamorous, in fact, it was quite rundown,” Sheth said. “There were inordinate delays, endless cups of chai. Stars would arrive late and sit in their vanity vans forever. Suddenly, somebody would shout, the director’s here. It seemed quite random. I didn’t think there was any order to this. But Khalid seemed to know how it all worked.”

Sheth had unbridled access, but also distance from her subjects. The Rekha image is an example of Sheth’s keenness on photography that worked in and of itself, rather than as a literal representation.

“Rekha was at the top of her career, very beautiful and very conscious of being very beautiful,” Sheth said. “She was in a private conversation with Khalid. I was prancing around the room taking pictures. She sort of noticed me. She said, I think you should move to this angle and get my cheekbones from here. I knew that this particular frame would work even before I developed it. You just kind of know she’s a star.”

One of the earliest photos in Flashback doesn’t have any people in it. The vertical image is from the set of the unfinished Dilip Kumar-starrer Kalinga. Despite the clutter, the composition has an enigmatic blankness.

“I really like this one because it’s sort of a Cinderella picture – the golden shoes, the tatty curtains, the stained sheets,” Sheth said. She would see many more such sets during her project, which had what she called “a kind of charm in the ordinariness”.

The photographs are subtle interpretations, rather than interventions. Objects that might decongest a frame or make it prettier have not been removed.

Rather, the effort is to work around existing elements, find patterns within the compositions. For instance, a photo of Sathyaraj on the set of Pangali is followed on the next page by an image of a crew member striking an identical pose.

“I never cropped my pictures or interfered with what was in the frame,” Sheth said. “My generation of photographers was trained to keep what they saw.”

Curiosity, rigour and empathy guide the selection in Flashback. “I wasn’t awed by the glamour – if anything, I think my pictures are more glamorous than what I remember the spaces to be like,” Sheth said. “There's something about a picture that should grab you by just looking at it. It’s not only about the light but also the form, an original way of seeing.”

When prowling the sets, Sheth followed a few principles.

“I’d move around a lot, scan the atmosphere, see whether there was a backdrop that was interesting if it was indoors or what the lighting was like outdoors,” she said. “I was always looking for what makes a good picture – it could be the machinery, or a star unadorned. Very often, there were aspiring stars wanting so much to be photographed that it was something precious to catch. There was a naturalness and seductive charm about these people who were getting paid almost nothing.”

There are surreal moments too, such as from the set of Jigar, starring Ajay Devgn and Karisma Kapoor. Sheth has a telling image of Kapoor in a Maruti van, looking every inch the movie star despite the drab backdrop.

In another vertical frame, Kapoor is emerging out of a set for a temple. She’s in the background. In the foreground, a technician is fast asleep. It looks like Kapoor is part of the man’s dream.

The photos might have felt entirely different if they were in colour. Until 2014, Sheth shot only on black and white film, a choice she attributes to her training. She turned to colour and the digital medium very recently, with the show Photo Studio in 2022. The exhibition comprised images that Sheth took during visits to traditional photo studios across India.

“Although there were great photographers who worked in colour, the majority of works I was looking at were in black and white,” Sheth said. “My entire world was black and white. It’s what I was trained in. Now that I am shooting in colour, I don’t know why I resisted it for so long.”

Most of the photographs in Flashback have never been seen before. Together, they constitute a dream factory tour that is grounded and clinical while also being alive to everyday magic.

“I moved on to other things in the 1990s, and the Bollywood pictures went into the recesses of my mind,” Sheth said. “When Devika [Daulet-Singh] and I sat down with the photos, she said, let’s pick the really good works. Let’s look at what makes a good picture regardless of who’s in it. We were looking at it more photographically than representationally.”