Masters in monochrome | Rohit Chawla's 'Portrait of an Artist'

Rohit Chawla joined JWT, the advertising titan, in the late 1980s—a decade and half after I had left its India version: HTA (Hindustan Thompson Associates). In this interim, everything had changed: the spray-painting of black-and-white photographs, the surgical precision of cut-and-paste typefaces from foreign magazines and the stark layouts that lacked the freedom of visual expression. Rohit was to become the mirror of that change. He used the mobility of his body and graphic ad-brain to invent original frames. He gave us new eyes like the images of Ashvin Gatha and Raghubir Singh had once done from abroad.