Born in Lucknow, Jahnvi Lakhota Nandan lives and works as a perfumer in Paris. She studied both architecture and perfumery and has a doctorate in architecture design from the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her previous book Tokyo Style File is a guide to design in Tokyo. It is while studying design in Japan in the late 1990s that she became interested in identities and knowledge, both individual and universal, revealed through memories related to product design. Design thus became the chain linking the last two decades of her life; the chain that had first propelled her to study architecture and that then took her to Paris to compose with the most elusive of all materials – smell.
In 2008, she created ‘The Memory Pod Project’ that is a theatre of olfactive memories, a project dedicated to the design of fragrances. With her second major project ‘The Perfume Library’ she creates spaces dedicated to the experience of the art of perfume. This book is a tribute to Indian design in all its senses.
About the Photographer
Shivani Gupta is a professional photographer and Indian Classical Mohiniattam dancer from Mumbai. Within her own study with performance and the camera, her practice is the visual, i.e., privileging the visual over the performative: beginning from the interior (the body) and moving to the exterior through the extension of qualitative matter: the camera.
She is interested in the possibilities of the camera as an agent of personal and cultural myth creation where photography can be used as a process to excavate the magic of places, people and objects to present a reality that is not within the framework of the banal. She currently works from her studio in Goa.
