“We create little image boxes of our own. One such box has begun to draw its lid tighter and tighter at present. It is the box that contains an image of my religion in millions of minds,” Shah Rukh Khan said in a 2013 article for Outlook Magazine called 'My Name Is Shah Rukh Khan'.
That’s why the mosaic, the tiny boxes. The photo-mosaic composite depicting Khan is made up of thousands of photos of men in Lahore taken in 2004.
When Outlook Magazine approached the artist with the proposition of using the Shah Rukh Khan portrait from his Ommatidia series for the cover, Pakistani artist Rashid Rana said it would be interesting to see how an image he made using the compound eye analogy of the Bollywood star is rethought in the current context. Rana’s series also had Hrithik Roshan and Salman Khan and explores notions of hero-worship, identities and intersection of multiple gazes.
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Look at him looking at you as you look at him and then at yourselves. The latest issue of Outlook Magazine features essays by Shrayana Bhattacharya, Varun Grover, Sayani Gupta, Rachel Dwyer, Beth Watkins, Giridhar Jha, Priyadarshini Shanker and Paromita Vohra. We are grateful to Chemould Prescott Road and Rashid Rana for letting us use the image on the cover.
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