Sadak Chhaap is an effort to document the craft of hand-painted typography. This project focuses on the hand-painted typography of the Gujarati script found in the streets of Ahmedabad. Since computerised design and printing technologies were introduced in the late 1990s, hand-painted signage has slowly become a dying craft. Besides, Indian regional scripts like Gujarati are far less documented than Latin-based scripts or even the Devanagari script. This project attempts to document both the dying craft and the undocumented script. The project has two parts: (1) an archive of painted signages, and (2) a film documenting the craft and the life of a painter based in Ahmedabad. The archive consists of 500 photographs of painted signages from different streets of Ahmedabad, each labelled with a description of the text in it, the type of surface it is painted on, and its location. The archive is made into a book. The film shows the process and the current state of the craft in the city of Ahmedabad by showing Raja Painter, an Ahmedabad-based painter, making paintings for clients. He also talks about his life, the craft, how he got into the business, and his opinions on the craft and its digital alternatives.
