‘Portrait of an Artist’ takes you inside the studios of India’s renowned painters and sculptors

There is a word photographer Rohit Chawla returns to again and again when describing his life’s work: trespassing. For the first four decades of his career — shooting prime ministers and film stars, artists and authors, for the covers and inside the pages of the country’s most prestigious magazines — he used to feel “lucky to be able to meet a particular actor or writer”. He was the interloper with the camera, grateful for whatever the subject chose to reveal. But something has shifted. “Now, at this stage of my life,” he says, “I look back and feel that I belong in this whole thing. Now, I can chronicle my own life rather than trespass. I still use portraiture to get to know the artists and creatives I admire more closely.”