Using CCA’s Pierre Jeanneret Fonds, this project explores Jeanneret’s photographic engagements with the idyllic Punjab countryside and Chandigarh hinterland. It suggests that in his view of a rapidly transforming space and time, Jeanneret moved beyond Charlotte Perriand’s notions of the camera as a “… machine for thinking, taking notes, and stirring emotions … an instrument of political engagement.” Jeanneret’s recordings were then an undeniable reassertion of the complex human and landscape palimpsest that had and would experience inevitable (and substantial) erasure, while a new city emerged from these untidy ruins.

Manu P. Sobti’s work on landscape mobilities and mappings of empires, urbanities, and architecture along the Eurasian Silk Road and the Indian Subcontinent is well-recognized. He is author of Chandigarh Re-think (ORO Publishers, published 2017) and two books under contract: Space and Collective Identity in South Asia: Migration, Architecture and Urban Development (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2022); and Riverine Landscapes, Urbanity and Conflict: Narratives from East and West (Routledge-Taylor & Francis, forthcoming 2023).