Philippe Lopez’s photography is an ode to handcrafted India
- Text by D’Arcy Doran
- Photography by Philippe Lopez

What happens when you put in your 10,000 hours and slip into a rhythm in your craft?
For photographer Philippe Lopez, after a decade of shooting in India, China and Cambodia, he decided that to keep evolving, he’d force himself to relearn shooting by stripping everything down to basics.
“What was happening is you reach a point where you know how to be efficient, using all the different tools and focal lens and techniques,” says Lopez, who won a World Photo Award for his painterly image of a procession of Typhoon Haiyuan survivors.
“And in the process, you are often dependent on the subject and not the other way around. It’s a submissive way of doing your photography because you go somewhere and you need to get something out of it. You format yourself.”
Lopez’s answer was to pick up a manual-focus camera with a simple 35mm millimetre lens and shooting in black and white and to take to the streets – inspired in part by his hero Magnum legend Raymond Depardon.


“It’s very different because you just go out to practice your art and you are not constrained by any format, or prerogatives. So it really became about falling in love with photography again. You become the primary tool – not the lens you use, not the camera you use.”
The results of this approach are on display this week at our own 71a Gallery this week in Lopez’s first solo exhibition Resonance: Screen to Street in India. For the project, Lopez returned to India nearly a decade after he lived there to capture the disappearing art of hand-painted Bollywood billboards.
Over successive trips, between 2010-2016, Lopez saw the same hand-painted style adapted to promote everything from Coca-Cola to politicians often using the same visual codes as the movie art. As he explored on foot, the project grew into a wider reflection on how handcrafted images shaped India’s kaleidoscopic street life.
“If you get good advice from photographers who have been doing this longer than you, they say there’s nothing better than using your feet and moving, moving to frame your subject in that 35mm, or whatever.”
“It builds a kind of tension. You’re moving around to get this thing organised and feeling the frame to get it the way you want it. When it’s there, it pops – and click. You don’t have to go back later and look at 120 pictures because you think something might be in there. You know you’ve got something.”


Resonance: Screen to Street in India is open at our own 71a Gallery from November 7 to November 10, 2019.
Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Latest on Huck

Maryam El Gardoum is breaking new shores for Morocco’s indigenous surfers
The Amazigh Atlantic — Through her groundbreaking career and popular surf school, the five-time Moroccan champion is helping women find their places in the waves.
Written by: Sam Haddad

Youth violence’s rise is deeply concerning, but mass hysteria doesn’t help
Safe — On Knife Crime Awareness Week, writer, podcaster and youth worker Ciaran Thapar reflects on the presence of violent content online, growing awareness about the need for action, and the two decades since Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy.
Written by: Ciaran Thapar

Volcom teams up with Bob Mollema for the latest in its Featured Artist Series
True to This — The boardsports lifestyle brand will host an art show in Biarritz to celebrate the Dutch illustrators’ second capsule collection.
Written by: Huck

A visual trip through 100 years of New York’s LGBTQ+ spaces
Queer Happened Here — A new book from historian and writer Marc Zinaman maps scores of Manhattan’s queer venues and informal meeting places, documenting the city’s long LGBTQ+ history in the process.
Written by: Isaac Muk

Nostalgic photos of everyday life in ’70s San Francisco
A Fearless Eye — Having moved to the Bay Area in 1969, Barbara Ramos spent days wandering its streets, photographing its landscape and characters. In the process she captured a city in flux, as its burgeoning countercultural youth movement crossed with longtime residents.
Written by: Miss Rosen

Tony Njoku: ‘I wanted to see Black artists living my dream’
What Made Me — In this series, we ask artists and rebels about the forces and experiences that shaped who they are. Today, it’s avant-garde electronic and classical music hybridist Tony Njoku.
Written by: Tony Njoku