Born on 12th March 1934, Jyotindra Manshankar Bhatt is one of the founding members of the Center of Photography, Baroda 

Jyoti Bhat is an Indian painter, printmaker, and photographer well-known for his vibrant works that blend a graphic sensibility with traditional Indian folk design He also has a large collection of images of the rural areas of India He was working as a painter until 1969 and taught the faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda In the 70s, the artist learned the intaglio concept of printing and screen printing

Bhatt started his journey as a photographer in 1967 when he was asked to photograph Gujarat Folk Art by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Mumbai When Bhatt first picked up a camera and started taking pictures of rural life in Gujarat and Maharashtra, he was studying painting and fresco, which led him to concentrate on intaglio printing techniques in the 1960s and '70s While travelling through rural Gujarat he captured a wide range of things that include Bandhani and other Kutch crafts, Havelis, tattooed bodies and painted temples and embroidery

He is well-known for his fascination with rangoli patterns, which he uses as inspiration for his vivid paintings and prints He is also influenced by calligraphic ideograms and cross-stitch embroidery

The peacock, the parrot, the lotus, stylized Indian gods and goddesses, and many variants on tribal and village motifs have all appeared in his etchings, intaglios, and screen prints as he has explored and re-explored a personal language of Indian cultural symbols His most recent research involves holography and digital printing

His work can be found in a variety of international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and the British Museum in London as well as the Bangalore Museum of Art and Photography