12”x18”, pen and watercolor on paper, 2017

Hollywood posters switched from illustration to photography at an early stage and they also tended to use a lot more textual information. In India, by contrast, the focus remained on painted images for most of the 20th century, and that's what made Bollywood so special. Additionally, if you look at the way banners, billboards and cinema displays were created here -- that was such a unique system as well. In Hollywood, the studios commissioned designs which were reproduced everywhere in exactly the same way. But here, you had dozens of painters across the country, using publicity stills to create their own handmade versions. I don't know if there were many other countries that had a similar wealth and diversity of images. - from "The Art of Bollywood: Ode to a pre-digital era in Indian film poster art" Alisha Patel