Five years ago, we founded Red Turtle Photobook—initially just Barnali Bose and Soumya Sankar Bose. Somraj later joined as our content editor, bringing a strong literary background that helped us shape the textual dimension of our books, which is essential to our practice. Eventually, our team expanded again with the addition of Samik, an executive producer who had hands-on experience running little magazines and other literary ventures.

Kolkata has a long and rich history of printing and publishing. From the early 1800s onward, the trade grew into one of the major professions in the city and its neighbouring regions. Yet its evolution has been slow, and many of the machines still operating today are manually run. So when we began publishing, it felt like a daunting venture. But we soon realised a few things that worked in our favour. First was affordability: printing costs in Kolkata are comparatively low, which makes our books accessible across the subcontinent and South Asia. Many of our titles—Let’s Sing an Old Song, Ascension, Downtown—remain under ₹2000 (22 USD) because the production costs were manageable. Printing elsewhere would have significantly increased both production and shipping expenses.

Second, communication plays a crucial role in printing. Working in Kolkata allows us to speak directly with printers and their staff in Bengali, discussing priorities without the friction of linguistic nuances or dialectal differences that often arise in other cities. Being based here also gives us the time and proximity needed for pre-production—designing, editing, and refining each book thoroughly.

For instance, A Discreet Exit Through Darkness took nearly a year and a half to prepare. We opted for cloth-binding, which meant searching through local markets to find the exact fabric we had envisioned. The printing staff were not initially familiar with this process, but over the years, these teams have grown deeply cooperative. They understand that our work is not purely commercial; they share our excitement in experimenting and creating something new. Now that our books are gaining attention in the larger publishing field, many artists are also showing interest in printing their books through local Kolkata presses.
For us, two principles remain non-negotiable: we will never compromise on quality, and we want our books to reach as wide a readership in the regional space as possible. That’s why we published Where the Birds Never Sing in Bengali. We collaborated with Mandas, a Bengali publishing house, and priced it at around ₹1000 (11 USD)—a remarkably accessible price for a photobook. At last year’s Kolkata Book Fair, many readers picked up copies, and the book has also reached readers in Bangladesh and various district fairs.

In this way, we’re trying to carve out a space for photobooks that deviates slightly from the conventional photography market, while staying rooted in Kolkata. Our core objective has always been simple yet unwavering: to make photobooks genuinely affordable and to carry them from local readerships to global audiences, building a bridge between our regional practices and the wider world.