Bodhi Art presented Ketaki Seth 's series of photographs titled Street Seen at Siddhartha Hall, Max Mueller Bhavan/Goethe- Institut, New Delhi from November 25 – Dec 15, 2008. The artist talks about her inspiration and works.

I began taking street pictures of Bombay in the late 80s under the watchful eye of Raghubir Singh, the renowned Indian photographer. His frequent visits to my parents' home in Bombay were filled with intense discussions on photography: books, critics, curators, exhibitions, film, cameras, photographers. Above all, he would scrutinize my contact sheets, often giving me a hot black and white tip from the darkrooms of his friends, the photographers Lee Friedlander and William Gedney. He was always concerned with getting the form right in an image, citing endless prescriptions from Atget to Winogrand. Or to make a further point, he would use this sporting analogy: ‘Watch re- runs of famous tennis matches. Look for that winning ball on the edge of the line, that's the kind of shot you want.' Raghubir was responsible for my collection of photography books, my introduction to incredible people and photographers, my exposure to rare archives and personal portfolios.

Bombay Mix did not start as a project to document the city. It evolved more like a scrapbook of photographs drawn from reams of contact sheets – those miniature reproductions of light and shadow, chaos and order, sharpness and fog. After a lapse of eight years living in London and a child and a book later, in 1999 I returned to my home in Bombay and looked at the contact sheets again. Many images were trashed, a few marked ‘possible' and the occasional one enlarged, until a pattern emerged. I went back to the streets to finish what now appears as the book Bombay Mix.

Bombay is a city that never sleeps. Its populations (17.7 million) and linear geography put a premium on space. A lot of ‘living' happens on the street. The book is called the Bombay Mix after a savoury snack. Each crunchy, spicy grain of the ‘mix' lingers in the taste buds, much like Bombay 's street life where a disparate and unlikely blend of humanity defines its boundaries in a tightly confined space.

Source: Author's Note, Bombay Mix