#Kolkata
BY: AASHIM TYAGI
Through the Street Type Archive, I document typography and signage across cities in India and beyond, from Mumbai and Chennai to Osaka. The project treats letterforms as cultural traces of how language, commerce and everyday life shape urban identity.
Lettering and fonts have an emotional function. We all feel it when we read a text. The same words written in Comic Sans MS or Times New Roman feel completely different. It is the same for a city. The styles of lettering and calligraphy that decorate streets, shopfronts, posters and signboards mould the personality of urban spaces.
Having photographed multiple cities as part of the Street Type Archive, Calcutta stands apart. Nothing prepared me for its typographic landscape, its diversity, its elegance, its contrasts and its character.
Calcutta, or Kolkata, always feels like it is living in several timelines at once. Streets shift quickly between moments in history. A turn of the head can take you from the early 1900s to the middle of the twentieth century and back to the present in a matter of seconds. . Likewise, the city’s signage feels like an open-air archive. The central neighbourhoods and the older commercial districts are filled with letterforms that carry the weight of decades. Many of the shop signs and building names are small lessons in art history.
Calcutta’s typography is not curated. It grows. It survives. It overlaps. It contradicts itself. Taken together, it becomes the city’s texture. Walking through these neighbourhoods is the only way to experience it. There is no substitute for seeing how one script leans into another, how an early-century sign sits above a freshly printed board, how different eras collide on a single building.
This is also where the Street Type Archive finds its purpose. The project is not about collecting beautiful signs for the sake of nostalgia. It is about paying attention to what cities express through their typography and what those expressions reveal about changing times. In Calcutta, this feels urgent. Many of the signs and buildings that define the city’s visual character are fragile. Neighbourhoods are evolving. Shops are closing or relocating. New signage solutions that prioritise speed and efficiency are replacing older forms that once relied on craftsmanship. Hand-painted lettering is disappearing.