Parr excellence

If you were to just feel the contours of this little snub-sided book, with its kitschy layout and pastel graphics, you'd be forgiven for mistaking it for a dog-eared childhood friend relating the adventures of an anthropomorphic bear. Instead, Martin Parr in India 1984-2001(Photoink, Rs 700) is an immortalisation of the eponymous British photographer&rsquos series in India part of an exhibition of his work displayed at Delhi's Photoink gallery earlier this year.

The images, entitled in both Urdu and English, chronicle Parr's various pit-stops in India over the past 17 years, as well as chart the evolution of his own professional preoccupations. His nostalgic, gently humorous black-and-white phase is borne out through images of Raj vestiges in genteel clubs and public schools in Darjeeling and Calcutta. His luridly coloured British Food phase continues in the cake shops of Delhi and their teddy-bear-bedecked confections, which declare themselves &lsquohappy&rsquo in noxiously bright icing. His worldwide quest for beach exhibitionism takes him man-bikini-spotting in Goa, and to those who photograph themselves beside celebrity and canine cutouts in Chennai's Marina Beach. You'll also see Delhi's representatives in Luxury, rapt in the baraat dancer's duende, or getting two cigarettes lit at a time.

Hyderabad's Pragati Offset has successfully recreated the kitsch charms of Parr's previous photobooks &mdash Playas and Everybody Dance Now &mdash the latter especially successful for the way its lurid, gradient-shaded production values echoed the flashing disco lights within. What makes these photobooks special, though, is precisely what some disgruntled customers declare to be their flaws their busy graphics-bedecked layouts and pixellated images, which make them, like the denizens who populate them, flawed, sweet and human.