There was a time when an event would not begin without a photographer. “I remember the days when event organisers would even delay a show if the photographer was running late,” says Balachandra Raju, a photographer of Sathyam studio, a still surviving photo studio in India’s southern city of Chennai.

Photo studios are facing extinction in the digital age. But as they struggle to continue doing the business, one research project is looking at ways to preserve their legacy (遗产) by digitising archival (档案的) pictures.

The project, funded by the British Library, visited around 100 photo studios across the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu and digitised 10,000 prints. Many of the photos were taken between1880-1980, and they ranged from pictures of families and famous stars to weddings and funerals. “The digital archive will be an asset (有用之物) for those interested in history,” said Zoe E Headley, one of the researchers. Ramesh Kumar, another researcher on the project, called it a “gold mine” for photographers. “The research we’ve done also highlights production techniques used before digital photography arrived in our cities and towns,” he said.

However, the researchers would often find old photos stacked (难叠) on top of one another in the storage room of a studio. “No one had bothered to clean them,” Kumar said, adding that many photos had been damaged due to the hot and wet weather in Tamil Nadu.

The owner of Nallapillai studio in central Tamil Nadu said he spends about 20,000 rupees (￡230; $310) each month to run the studio that was founded by his great grandfather almost 150 years ago. To survive in this digital age has been a struggle. “Many customers don’t book us for special events anymore,” he said, adding that they have all got smartphones to do the job. “I’m not sure if photo studios will exist five years from now,” he said. But this is why, according to Mr Raju, this archival project is so important. “When the researchers spent hours in my studio, I saw them get excited over all of these old photos, and it was like they had given these pictures a second chance,” Raju said.

In 2018, a major new exhibition opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The show brought together more than a hundred works by a single Brazilian artist: Tarsila do Amaral. Although widely celebrated in her native country, the artist was relatively unknown outside Brazil. So who was Tarsila?

Born in 1886, Tarsila do Amaral is considered the mother of modern art in Brazil. She first developed a love for art after her parents sent her to study in Spain. She returned to Europe a few years later, and settled in Paris. Several artists there, including Picasso, were beginning to experiment with new forms — less realistic and more abstract. The new approaches continued to influence Tarsila after she returned to Brazil.

Approaches to art in Brazil at that time were relatively conservative (保守的). Traditional European styles dominated, with works mainly featuring natural, religious, or historical scenes in soft colors. Tarsila decided to take a different direction: “I want to be the painter of my country,” she wrote. Her images began to reflect Brazil’s diverse identity — a mix of native, African, and European peoples. She used strong, vivid colors to paint real-life scenes of the nation’s farmers, countryside, and wildlife. This had never been done before in Brazilian art.

One of Tarsila’s most famous works is Abaporu (1928), which means “Man Who Eats People.” The painting has a playful quality, but its look and feel are distinctly Brazilian. The work later inspired a Brazilian art movement called antropofagia. Brazilian artists began to take in styles from other cultures and mix them with local influences. The result was something uniquely Brazilian.

Tarsila do Amaral died in Sao Paulo in 1973, age 86. But her artwork and legacy live on in her native Brazil. “For Brazilians, her recognition is off the charts,” says James Rondeau, director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “She is the Picasso of Brazil.” Now, with the MoMA exhibition, Tarsila’s art is being appreciated by a new audience of admirers around the world.

Fans of art believe that its main purpose is to make us look at life from many different angles. When it comes to Cubism, however, the artists of this era wanted us to look at life from every angle.

The father of Cubism, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, is among the art world's most famous names. Like many other great names before him, he felt restrained by the rules of his teachers and decided to do something: break them.

Early in his painting career, Picasso realized something important about how people view and remember scenes of beauty. When we look at a subject, we don’t just see it from one angle, as many paintings appear. Instead, we study the subject from a number of different angles, heights and viewpoints. This is the aim of Cubism: It portrays subjects from a wide range of angles; it doesn’t force us to see things as the artist viewed them at the time he or she painted them. To bring his visions to life, Picasso and other Cubists took the most basic components of a subject and rearranged them in a way which let us see it in full detail.

“By breaking objects and figures down into distinct areas, Picasso aimed to show different viewpoints at the same time and within the same space,” in the words of the Tate Institution. Or as Lithuanian-born Cubist Jacques Lipchitz once put it: “Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different.”

Cubism stood out as it was an art movement which didn't just rely on the artist to share their vision by painting what they saw. As cubist paintings mainly show their subjects in a deconstructed form, this means that viewers must use their imaginations to find the missing pieces for themselves. As Guardian art critic Johnathan Jones noted, this is part of the beauty of enjoying Picasso’s works. “If you can relax your gaze enough and just enjoy the painting long enough, something really amazing happens. Your mind produces a solid feeling of the things Picasso was looking at the world is revealed in its majesty,” he wrote.