There is a word photographer Rohit Chawla returns to again and again when describing his life’s work: trespassing. For the first four decades of his career — shooting prime ministers and film stars, artists and authors, for the covers and inside the pages of the country’s most prestigious magazines — he used to feel “lucky to be able to meet a particular actor or writer”. He was the interloper with the camera, grateful for whatever the subject chose to reveal. But something has shifted. “Now, at this stage of my life,” he says, “I look back and feel that I belong in this whole thing. Now, I can chronicle my own life rather than trespass. I still use portraiture to get to know the artists and creatives I admire more closely.”This almost melancholic observation informs his latest book in subtle ways. Portrait of an Artist, published by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and co-published by Mapin Publishing (₹2,500), brings together 67 portraits of Indian artists spanning generations and mediums — from S.H. Raza and Akbar Padamsee to Bharti Kher and Shilpa Gupta, from the late masters Tyeb Mehta and Bhupen Khakhar to younger painters such as Kulpreet Singh. The text, crystalline and unencumbered, is by the art critic Kishore Singh.