Everything that is so essentially Bollywood, the varied components that harmoniously coalesce to make a film, are depicted in Fawzan’s photographs. He shoots a different view of Bollywood by espying behind the scenes of action: no conventional, ‘frontal’ portraits, no staged construction of pretty images. Fawzan portrays the real ambience and the real people without movie glamour, artefacts that prop up stardust and ‘larger-than-life’ posturing—an idea that led him beyond moving pictures and the beautiful people that populate them. Moreover, it’s a look at how Bollywood has held Indians in its thrall for decades.
Yet, Bollywood lies beyond its sets, indoor or outdoor—Fawzan could see traces strewn all around. And not only on billboards, he could find them in restaurants, on kites, in gyms, in rickshaws.... Some served the purpose of decoration, some as marketing strategy, others were a pure testimony to fandom. To Faizan, all this cohered to construct the intangible we know as Bollywood.
