Can't afford expensive art? Buy an artist’s book instead

If you want to buy a work by an artist like Bharti Kher, Marina Abramović or Sebastião Salgado, you will be looking to spend at least several thousand dollars. And that’s not all. You will also need to invest in the infrastructure to take care of such a precious piece—a temperature-controlled environment, expensive insurance scheme and security arrangements. No wonder collecting art has always been the preserve of the uber-elite. But what if you could own a piece by one of the greats for a fraction of the price?

At the India Art Fair this year, CMYK (the flagship store of Delhi-based publisher Roli Books) has put together a collection of rare and collectible books under the banner, The Art of the Book. Each of these books is a limited edition, which comes with a mark of exclusivity—be it the artist’s signature or special paraphernalia that transforms it into an “art object”. “We have works starting at under ₹50,000, going up to ₹40 lakh,” says Kapil Kapoor, managing director at Roli Books.

Among the pieces at the higher end is Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet, which comes in a limited edition portfolio of 50 (along with five artist’s proofs) and is priced at ₹40 lakh. The clamshell box, in which the book is contained, includes 10 archival silver gelatin prints from Harrer’s original negatives and a printed message that has been signed by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. “Getting our hands on this work has been a coup for us,” Kapoor says, “Not only are these images of great historic value but the set includes what Harrer claims to be the last photo of the Dalai Lama taken by him before he fled Lhasa.”

In the more affordable range is a special edition of India Through Iconic Maps by Deepti Anand, Juhi Valia and Sanghamitra Chatterjee, published by Roli Books last year, which comes in a clamshell box with a framed archival print of one of four maps, each of a limited edition of 10. By itself, the book retails at ₹30,000, but with the framed print, the price goes up to ₹48,000.

For an aspiring collector who doesn’t want to break the bank, it is possible to own a piece that is exclusive as well as visually stunning. But to convert an art enthusiast into a potential buyer of such an object, there needs to be a wider public awareness, an evolution of taste and ideas of ownership, and a reckoning with the rights of the book to exist as art.

“One of the reasons I got into antiquities is to show how books as an art form have been around for centuries,” Kapoor says. “The miniaturists were making it then and we are making it now.”

In recent years, some of the most inventive work has been done using the book as a medium, especially by lens-based artists. This edition of IAF bears testimony to this trend.

SENSORY OBJECTS

Ten years ago, when Rahaab Allana, curator and publisher at Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi, started an annual photobook grant, he, like Kapoor, had been inspired by a model that had existed for centuries. “Art history was a bedrock for me when I was a student,” he says, “I was used to looking at manuscripts from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries that were created by guilds of artists working for a patron.” Using the book as a medium of expression, it is possible for an artist to “build an experience through sensory interventions,” he says.

One of the early publications to come out of this grant was Filmi Jagat (2014), a found scrapbook of images from the earliest years of Indian cinema, introduced by Allana, along with Kaushik Bhaumik and Debashree Mukherjee. Although the makers of this extraordinary document remained anonymous, the very existence of such a work proved, to quote Allana, that “subdued and strident methodologies have always been part of the practice of artists, even if they were autodidacts.”

The Alkazi Foundation became formative in supporting artists who had been struggling to create books of their own. “European publishers almost always ask for sponsorship to publish these books because of the expenses involved,” Allana says.

The artists had to do the heavy-lifting, starting with applying for grants and getting involved in the production process to retailing the product through their network. But even before the book grant came into being and enabled the work of many talented bookmakers, it was Dayanita Singh, one of contemporary India’s finest lens-based artists, who had redefined the scope of the artist’s book.

From her earliest works, such as Myself, Mona Ahmed (2001), Privacy (2004), Chairs (2005) and Go Away Closer (2007), Singh had set herself on a unique trajectory, where the photographic image gradually lost its appeal in isolation. Instead, the viewer was forced to look at a body of work collectively to make sense of the artist’s intentions.

With Sent a Letter (2008) Singh had reached an inflection point. Not only did she put the medium of photography into the service of creating an original artistic vision, but she also built an entire architecture around it by putting accordion-fold booklets in a cardboard box. The result was an object of beauty, a collectible that cost a few thousand rupees and could be displayed as the owner liked.

Since then, Singh has restlessly played with different forms and structures. Prints and books inside frames, boxes and freewheeling museums have become her signature style, taking her work around the world, beyond the ivory towers of wealth and affluence into more modest homes. Indeed, a key reason behind these experiments was her desire to make her work more democratic and give it a public life.

“In the last few decades, there has been a significant shift in prices in the art world,” Singh says. “As art becomes more expensive, the book object begins to turn premium.”

She gives the example of her book on her friend Mona Ahmed, Myself Mona Ahmed. “If you want to buy a single print of Mona, there is none available,” Singh says. “If you want something bigger than the book, you can buy one of my book objects (that feature her).”

WAYS OF OWNING

In 2018, Delhi-based artist Anshika Varma founded Offset Projects, a multichannel initiative that engages with photography and its evolving relationship with storytelling, identity and history. Apart from a curated reading room, workshops and residencies, it has a photobook library, Offset Pitara, and a publishing imprint, Offset Press. “Books provide a beautiful entry point to looking at and understanding an artist’s practice as a whole instead of engaging with it in a fractional way,” says Varma.

Lens-based artist Bharat Sikka, who has been making books for 10-15 years, describes the experience as “holding a complete body of work in your two hands.”

At IAF, Offset Projects is bringing together a curated Collector Series of limited-edition portfolio boxes featuring the work of early- and mid-career lens-based artists: Sean Lee from Singapore, Prasiit Sthapit from Nepal and Pretika Menon, who is based in Goa. Each portfolio box, priced at ₹65,000, contains six archival pigment prints and, as the curatorial note puts it, “is conceived as an intimate, collectible format that encourages sustained engagement with artistic processes.”

Be it Lee’s documentation of his parents’ life, Sthapit’s exploration of the relationship between land, people and the river in Susta, or Menon’s chronicle of one family in Goa, largely focused on the two daughters—these book objects have a strong conceptual foundation. Their coming together validates Singh’s belief that “the book becomes an object when it is conceived as such, not in hindsight.”

Apart from the portfolio boxes, Offset Press has a wide selection of artists’ books, “foregrounding the book as a sculptural, narrative, and conceptual medium,” as the curatorial note puts it. Featuring works by Himali Singh Soin, Radha Pandey, Hari Katragadda, Shweta Upadhyay and Vasudhaa Narayanan, among others, this rich showcase speaks for the growing interest in the art of the book.

One reason behind this increased focus on book-based art forms, Allana believes, is because we live in an intensely image-saturated culture. “We are becoming used to looking at the image much faster due to the way it is consumed on social media platforms,” he says. “Maybe that’s why the ‘photobook’ is becoming more ‘readable’.” As the ways in which we perceive the world continue to change, publishers will have to reinvent their businesses to create a captive readership for artists’ books. Kapoor of Roli Books says there is anecdotal evidence of a growing appetite for such works in the subcontinent, especially if we consider the growing value of some of these books.

A few years ago, Roli Books brought to India Thomas Laird’s Murals of Tibet, an artist-signed SUMO sized limited edition of 998 copies, with six large foldouts. It came with a modular bookstand designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. “A few years ago, it was priced at ₹9.5 lakh,” Kapoor says. “Now that only a few copies remain to be sold, it is retailing at ₹20 lakh.”

Even as publishers build channels of distribution and create access to artists’ books, raising awareness of their value among a wider audience remains a challenge. In a price-sensitive market like India, the likelihood of a typical bibliophile paying a few thousand rupees for a book remains slim. “In Europe, the difference between the prices of, say, a novel and a photobook isn’t often that wide,” says Singh, “unlike in India, where the gap of pricing between trade books and artists’ books is much larger.” As a result, in the current system, the author of an artist’s book hardly makes any money.

These hurdles aren’t going to be overcome overnight but at least a start has been made by showing the artists’ book to a wider audience. Recently, Singh paid for the printing of a new edition of Kolkata-based photographer Kushal Ray’s 2012 book, Intimacies. Radically reimagined in terms of style and approach, it was published by Mandas Publisher at the Kolkata Book Fair 2026, priced at ₹900. “A portion of the sales will go to the author as royalties,” Singh says.

This is one way of working with the system, without compromising on the quality and vision of a work. Hopefully, the future holds many such innovative possibilities.