Ajay Rajgarhia
You can buy photograph prints from his Web site.
Till last year, Ajay Rajgarhia was a garment exporter, but his mind was clearly not in the business. Driving from his factory in Noida to meetings in different parts of Delhi, he would pause -- struck by a particular image on a street corner, or the play of light on the surface of a puddle -- take his camera out (he always travelled with one) and invariably arrive late for appointments.
"Instead of reaching some place in one hour, I would reach in two," he chuckles. Having held an exhibition of his photographs shot mainly in Delhi ("because I had not travelled much till then"), he decided to plunge full-time into photography.
Today, you can no longer label Rajgarhia's dalliance with the lens a mere "pastime" -- it is well on its way to becoming a worthwhile enterprise. While his own photographs may or may not appeal to your artistic sensibilities, his e-biz model -- a Web site devoted to Indian photography with works by well-known and upcoming photographers -- will surely interest collectors. The works of 30 photographers can be seen on http://www.wonderwall.co.in. These include works of Pradeep Dasgupta, Dinesh Khanna, Karan Khanna, Leena Kejriwal and Malkait Singh.
For the featured photographers, this is obviously a more convenient proposition than exhibiting in a real-time gallery. "Here, they just need to send in low resolution pictures," Rajgarhia points out.
For the entrepreneur himself, the risks -- despite switching from a more conventional line of work -- are few since there are no overheads. Which is why Rajgarhia shrugs off suggestions that he may have taken a huge gamble at the age of 40, with a family to support and no ancestral wealth, so to speak, by following his ‘hobby.’
Wonderwall's USP is also that it is possibly the only such arty Web site where buyers have the option of paying online. Though, of course, "the art market being what it is, a lot of cash transactions take place," Rajgarhia admits. A lot of the buyers are corporate, but will this model work?
Rajgarhia is clear about that. "Interest in photography, unlike in art, is still nascent in India. So, of course, I can't compare my earnings from my garments factory with this, but I wanted to have the first-mover advantage in this market," he says. The rest, time will tell.
Image: You can buy photograph prints from Ajay Rajgarhia's Web site.
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