Entropy — a performance inspired from fear, on peace — was organised at Forplay Society, Mattanchery on October 29 and 30. Rather than representing a single concept, Entropy develops in each spectator differently depending on their association with their surroundings. As a transdisciplinary work of art, it fuses theatre and film, which complement each other throughout the performance.

From the erstwhile Madras, on the inauguration day, MGR arrived at the Cochin old airport, and I was there to shoot him. As a big fan of MGR, obviously one among the millions of MGR lovers, I cherished my fascination to meet and shoot him. A master performer who excelled in playing fashionable, romantic, globetrotting and adorable heroes, MGR was unique by all standards. As most of the journalists and photographers took images of his arrival and left, I decided to stick around.

Nick Oza is a staff photojournalist at the Arizona Republic where he covers community and national issues like immigration, gang violence, mental health, and refugees. His 20+ years of experience behind the camera have taken him to places like Iraq, India, Benin, Mexico, Guatemala and all over North America. Recently he is working on Politics and Immigration crisis. He is driven by curiosity, compassion and a deep desire to tell the stories of the people he documents. His multimedia work has been honored with an Emmy Award and his documentary photos have received honors from Pictures of the Year International and NPPA's Best of Photojournalism. He was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of the Biloxi Sun Herald's coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

After my father’s demise, I stumbled upon a few negatives he had preserved along with some valuable documents. It was amidst this, I found a few strips of the negatives of the Carnival Parade 1985 (The First Cochin Carnival), the culminating event of the year-long Beach Festival (1984-85). The origin of the Cochin Carnival is a lot more straightforward than what is being popularly narrated today. It began as a celebration of the UN Declaration of 1985 as the International Youth Year. Such a remarkable cultural event was made possible in Kochi thanks to its rich cosmopolitan history.

What motivated Weideman to keep photographing? The answer to this is also an important quality that makes his photographs intriguing. He continued shooting even though he was not exhibiting nor getting into any sort of limelight until the mid-90s. Passion for the medium, of course. But there is more.

Across the world there are ongoing attempts to construct a ‘people’s history’ through photographs. Memory Projects, they are fondly called, focus mainly on the pre-digital era when photography was not as common as today. Bengali photographer Anandarup Goswami’s photography series ‘A Home of No Return’, though not directly linked with any memory project, shows certain resemblances with the latter’s style, and yet carries its own soul. A Home of No Return visually narrates the past and the present through a mixture of faded and fresh photographs.

Portrait photography is one of the areas where Raghu Rai has displayed mastery, and where he has revealed his own deepest convictions about the medium. Photomail investigates photographs of four spiritual and political leaders made by Raghu Rai, seeking to find what patterns run beneath the surfaces of these images.

The Indian Photography Festival 2018 certainly leaves one wondering about what is so Indian about it; if it is, as claimed, only a geographical marker, how does one account for the large regions that are left unrepresented? One has to hazard a guess as to what really constitutes this Indianness, and if the claims are kept aside and the images surveyed, we are confronted with the truth of this Indianness – it is a construction rooted in what can be called a “global culture”, and can shape shift into whatever is needed of it.

Not to be left behind, the ‘Indian’ part of IPF peddles the same narratives that were used by the colonial empire – that of a beautiful land worthy of investment, and that of a people still struggling with modernity – albeit this time the narration is partially to itself, specifically to the modernized urban class.

Indian photography hasn’t seen many such explorations that interact and intersect with other media such as light art. But this has started to change in the last couple of years, with a few photographers trying to do light painting; and it is in this context that Joyel K Pious and Gaurav Rachamalla’s collaborative photo project becomes striking. Although this style is popular in the west, this collaborative project stands tall and distinctive amidst the usual Indian street and documentary photographs. It probes the philosophical underpinnings that are intrinsic to the medium itself as well as pose several questions related to urbanisation.

It is the sheer absurdity of the sculptures created and photographed by Ajith that hits the viewer right from the off – juxtapositions (reminiscent of the Dadaists and Surrealists) in which materials and the forms they are used to create are often in conflict with each other and, at other times, are self-referential in a darkly humorous manner.

Alessio Mamo’s series of photographs titled ‘Dreaming Food’ was shot in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in 2011, in which he tried to illustrate the contrast in the manner food was wasted in the West “especially at Christmas time”, and the widespread poverty that he saw in parts of India. The series was exhibited in Delhi Photography Festival in 2013, but when he posted images from the series during his takeover of World Press Photo’s Instagram handle as one of its awardees of 2018, a public debate erupted around the nature of his work and its political correctness. WPP has since issued a statement in which it clarifies the guidelines for its Instagram takeover, which is a benefit given to its award winners. But Indian print and online media subsequently took up the issue and it has been given wide coverage, with experts, photographers, and commentators weighing in from all sides. Now that all the arguments for and against have been brought out, PhotoMail takes a look at this issue in the broader context of poverty representation in India.

The LGBTQ community has found for itself public spaces in urban regions. We will wait and see what they want to tell the world from that space. After all, solidarity with the cause does not mean solidarity with the acts, and it is time for the community to begin to act convincingly. This exhibition is a good starting point, and further on, there is a desperate need for clarity on the part of the activist-artists.

John Abraham joined the Odessa group that comprised of 75 members, using the money collected from the people, travel from Wayanad to Kochi and Amma Ariyan develops, parallel to the political history of Kerala. The public, apart from giving money, were also involved in the film production. They did it voluntarily, with a lot of enthusiasm. The screenplay and dialogues were written then and there, and shot. Commercial actors didn’t play a major role in this movie.

The selling point of the exhibition as it currently stands is the technique of pinhole photography itself, and the evidence of the technique in these images lies solely in the tonal identity and distortions, most of which in fact can be recreated in a digital environment and by itself are not enough to provide an affirmation of the chemical or physical techniques used. What survives then is only the attestation of the photographer, and in effect, the art object gets its value from this textual affirmation.

Not surprisingly, Indian photographers were greatly impressed by Cartier-Bresson's “popular” style and followed suit, stalking the streets. Like master, like students; and it is only natural for knowledge to be transpired across cultures in this manner. Only that this popular aesthetics of street photography has been considered déclassé in the postmodern context, and the questions around its ethics remain unresolved. Sadly, even now the most celebrated photographs of post-colonial India are street photographs and there is a continuing market for this genre of photographs at the International platforms.

Photographic mapping of Tiruvannamalai has always been a daunting task, due to its complex culture, and previous works done by prominent international photographers like Eliot Elisofon, and Henri Cartier-Bresson after him. The photographs of Ramana and the Annamalaiyar temple, which were published in Life magazine and Magnum, have established them as the most prominent identifiers of the town, making any previous attempts (if any, at all) to create a visual catalogue of a Tiruvannamalai that lay outside these stereotypes, all but indiscernible.

Victor George looked for meaning in rain, not formal beauty or abstraction. Instances of abstraction are sporadically seen in his photographs – such as a massive raincloud which looks like a wash of purple-grey – but are always marred by a concrete, meaningful, identifiable figure – in the aforementioned case, a flying bird occupies the centre of attention of the image, and discernible clouds are seen in the background, giving the image concreteness.

Photography, after the Second World War and McCarthyism, was consciously pushed into the sanitised spaces of Art galleries and Museums away from its past as a concerned, conscience-pricking tool. We were told by institutional gatekeepers like the Museum of Modern Art in New York that Photography was only about Itself. It was an Art form that was about navel-gazing photographers and about flattened formalist fields. Photography was not supposed to exist outside its own frame.

Does a photo carry a meaning? Like a memory which has a meaning, photo doesn’t in itself have a meaning. Stills don’t speak but they are not dead as such. They evoke memories and memory evokes the meaning behind the image. - NL Balakrishnan

Walls have been featured as subjects, or at least as integral parts of broader subjects, by many artists across various media, owing to its metaphorical significance, its role as a visual and spatial block, and also what its surface holds. Shanthi Kashi’s concern is the surface of these walls, on which the artist observes patterns, forms, and colours and composes them to achieve – not necessarily literal – meaning. Shot in Mumbai and Bangalore, Shanthi also merges an abstract language with some very real phenomena related to the individual, geography and society through the presence of moisture, decay, erasure and abandonment.

Inasmuch, every photographer that ever visited Tiruvannamalai never took notice about anything other than Ramana and the Annamalaiyar temple – their eyes glossing over everything else and their focus devoted entirely to the two ‘divine’ icons. But, there remains a Tiruvannamalai beyond, which has gone unnoticed and undocumented – invisible to the colonial gaze that is pre-occupied with its exotic fairy tales, and underwhelming for the photojournalist due to its perceived mundane-ness.

Abul Kalam Azad's ‘Men of Pukar’ does not try to ‘re-narrate’ Ilango’s Kaveripattinam but Azad has his own heroes and heroines and more often he cuts his depth of focusing short in order to present them within the discursive premises where the incongruity between the history and present day condition of the place is felt. He neither tries to document the relics of the past glory (if there is anything at all) nor claims his images to be that of some ‘historical’ moments. Instead, he allows viewers to delve into the ‘image-space’ for some cultural codes which would help them to re-read the historical narratives in multiple ways.

Pulavar N Thiagarajan is a poet, writer, political activist and amateur photographer. Thiagarajan was brought up in Poompukar, and has completed his matriculation in Poompukar, and further pursued a course under Madras University. Thiagarajan learnt English and Tamil from school, and developed each through personal reading and study. He soon joined the Tamil Manila Congress (TMC), and fondly remembers meeting Gandhi at Mayavaram (presently Mayiladuthurai). He was active in the freedom struggle and continued to work with the Congress after Independence. A noted poet and writer, the most significant book that he has published is Poompukar Varalatru Yechangal, which is an academic book on the history of Poompukar. His journey in photography began in the 1940s and he has photographed the town and nearby areas, focussing on the temples, temple art, gatherings and landscapes. Ekalokam Trust for Photography, a non-profit organisation dedicated to protecting and promoting contemporary photography, is presently archiving the analogue photographs made by N Thiagarajan.

The Kalpathy festival is held over a period of 10 days, such that the last day of the festival falls on the 1st day of Vrischikam (Karthika) month. Vrishchikam is a period of rituals and festivals in many places, notably Sabarimala and Tiruvannamalai. Today, the Kalpathy festival is attended by many communities apart from the Tamil Brahmins, although the festival is conducted by the residents of new and old Kalpathy, and Chathapuram. Much like the rest of Palakkad, the Kalpathy festival has allowed for a mixture of what could be called the Chera culture and the Pandyan culture.

The existence of Manigramam (Manikkiramam) in Pukar, in this context, is an important surviving evidence of our shared lineage. As literary sources attest, Pukar was one of the gateways through which the Afro-Arabian traders entered Southern India. This simple board points to three thousand and odd years of cultural exchange that happened across borders.

Zachariah D’Cruz is not an oft-mentioned name in the context of Indian photography, and his images circulate in India, especially Kerala, without his name being mentioned as the author. It is easiest to describe him as a government photographer of the Travancore kingdom, whose most popular and most visible work today consists of a collection of 76 images titled “Album of South Indian Views”, which was gifted to Lord Curzon1 on his visit to Travancore, and which is now in the possession of the British Library.

Punalur Rajan is a now-retired photographer who was one of the first photographers in Kerala who popularized the social documentary genre. Rajan is most recognized for his portraits of litterateurs, politicians and cine-personalities. Rajan’s photography can be described as being an offshoot of the same thought that produced Sunil Janah. The Communist Party was an integral driving force in both of their careers and in their photographic practice. A reflection of Sunil Janah’s impact in the national level can be seen in the influence of Rajan in a regional level. Photographing notable personalities, especially literary icons, was a trend that was and continues to be widespread in Kerala, supported by the many weekly and daily publications that wanted these photographs. Such images were largely attempted by journalistic photographers, rather than studio photographers, despite portraiture not being an area of specialization for most of them. Rajan’s skill in portraiture is what set him apart from the other photographers who have indulged in this genre over the years. 

Controversy surrounds the origin of Brahmin clans, which is divided into ‘gotras’, and as such mutually opposing thoughts and evidences – both scriptural and historical – are put forth by the differing factions. As far as South India is concerned, the Tamil Brahmins and their Vedic ideas started spreading during the period when Buddhism and Jainism was gaining popularity (around 5th century BCE).

Krishna Reddy’s engagements and activism during his youth was informed by a compulsion to overturn the established order. The Indian struggle for independence was gaining momentum during this period, with Mahatma Gandhi calling for the complete end to British rule in India – and Reddy joined the protests. Following Reddy’s involvement with the Quit India Movement, for which he printed hundreds of posters and was jailed a couple of times, he moved to Santiniketan – where, under the tutelage of Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee, and Ramkinkar Baij, he studied sculpture and water colour.

In South India, coconut palm and palmyra tapping was practiced by the indigenous population who, later during the process of class/caste consolidation, were called the Shanars (Channars). These early settlers considered Palmyra as the single most miraculous tree and were the largest consumers of its products. Scaling a Palmyra, which can grow up to 100 feet, is a rather specialized job done by the men.

In this photograph, the farmer is not the one who is gazed upon. He is actually returning the gaze. There is an act of seeing and being seen. He becomes more present with an unspoken communication that is transpiring between the photographer and himself. There is a connection, an intimate relation between them.

The life of fishermen has a certain rhythm and the timings are in tune with nature – the weather, the water current, the movement and the life cycle of fishes. They all go and return at different times - the modern day ‘nine to five routine’ is not applicable here. For example, the crab catchers usually go during the late evening to spread their nets. They would go back again in the early morning to collect their catch.

River Cauvery - the lifeline of South India – that traverses through all the four states and Puducherry Union territory is personified as a goddess/woman. Several rituals, along her course, have been practiced since pre-historic times. The most important amongst them are the ones conducted at the mouth where the river merges with the infinite ocean – the end of a journey often analogized with the journey of a human life.

Selvaprakash Lakshmanan is an independent photographer based in Bangalore. He earned his Masters in Communication from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli (2000 - 2002). In the year 2002, he started his career in photography as a staff photographer for Dinamalar, a leading Tamil newspaper and has later worked with Dinakaran, DNA and Time Out Magazine. His photographs have been published in leading National and International newspapers and magazines and exhibited in photo festivals. In this exclusive interview, he is sharing his work life and thoughts on photography.

The realist discourse of photography believes that photographs capture the world as it is. As scientific, empirical knowledge. It is the Camera’s mechanical nature, which is supposed to give us the unchallenged, unassailable ‘reality’ of photography. It presents us with the image of photography as a mechanized form of perception. 

PhotoMail takes a look at the re-opening of Draavidia in Fort Cochin, with its decade long history of involvement in the local scenario and URU in Mattancherry which brings with it the success of the KMB in the backdrop of the art history of the region. Includes exclusive interview with the founders of URU and Dravidia and a review of their premiere shows.

As the tradition dictates, this stucco sculpture is not ‘signed’ by anybody either, even though it is not that old. Stucco techniques have been known to sculptors for millennia. Some historians opine that the pyramids were plastered white. The Greeks and Romans are known to have used stucco in constructions and sculptures. It must be during this period that Sangam era Tamils (the predecessors of modern south Indians) learned this technique, through maritime traders.

Tamil people are familiar with this scene from the Classical period epic Silappathikaram. They are aware of the background of Kannaki, the lady in the pretty saree, and Kovalan, her husband, who is receiving the anklet. The scene depicts a pivotal moment in which the once wealthy and now penniless merchant Kovalan is returning to his wife, after a brief, passionate affair with a dancer and courtesan, Matavi.

For about half its life, the Indian film industry has been dominated by Bollywood, at least in terms of presence in society, popularity and scale of productions. Bombay took over as the major center of film production in India from Calcutta, and gave birth to the Bollywood – the name itself is a clear homage to the ideal it aspired to. Bollywood has since dictated the imagination of the majority of the middle class of the country, directly and indirectly; and in this aspect, the presence of the still photographer in the set is often underestimated.

Razak Kottakal’s photographs of Basheer is almost as famous as Basheer himself; anybody who is familiar to a minimum extent with Modern Malayalam literature would have encountered at least a few of Razak’s portraits of literary figures, without knowing the name of the photographer – mostly because the photographer is considered secondary to the subject in such cases. Different aspects of Razak’s life have entered public record, through interviews of his contemporaries, family, colleagues, and subjects. Yet, for all the wealth of information that such records provide, they are hard reminders that photographers are barely understood beyond superficial labels.

Stairs to Nowhere is an opportunity to see the side effects of urbanisation. With complex migration and bloating population in the cities, there is a huge focus on development of infrastructure. In the name of development, we ended up razing old structures most of the times for larger projects; say the likes of highway expansion, metro train building, or sometimes even building an extra room in our homes. Stairs to Nowhere is an extrapolation of such developments, which interpret the current scenario to the near future, where we will have NO PLACE TO GO. Stairs to Nowhere is an ongoing project.

The idea of ‘documentary’ goes to the heart of the invention of photography. Historically distinct from painting, the iconic-index-symbol structure of photographs quickly impressed with its capacity to ‘document’ things, a function which today, in an age of photo-copiers and electronic machines that reproduce instantly, is so obvious that it seems banal to even mention it here.

Mukaish Badla is a form of embroidery, which at its peak flourished in the Indian city of Lucknow. At its peak in the 18th century, the art form travelled to different parts of the world, but is now restricted to a few narrow lanes of the old city of Lucknow. The art was introduced, by the Nawabs who ruled the city, to beautify another form of embroidery called chickankari — which still persists in the Indian subcontinent. Mukaish, however, ended up becoming an independent style and flourished across the city in the past.

Ramesh Varma is a noted stage actor and director. He is also a Kathakali performer and has acted in lead roles in few Malayalam cinemas. An alumnus of Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam, and School of Drama, Thrissur, he is currently a lecturer in the theatre department in Sree Sankaracharya University, Kalady. His theatre works are notable for their focus on regional aesthetics and forms, with due importance being given to innovation and contemporary thought. He takes keen interest in photography, and has been practicing it diligently for the past six years. The numerous and varied photographs taken during his ‘Morning Walk’, a series of black and white images, are indeed theatrical, in the truest sense. Ramesh Varma has worked as a curator in ITFoK. In this exclusive interview by Arjun Ramachandran / Photo Mail, Ramesh Varma talks about aesthetics, the direction, and the future of theatre, while touching on the personal and the political facets of expression in different media.

Indian Jews, a small ethnic community, gradually diminishing in numbers, maintain their cultural identity in an otherwise deeply divided society such as India. Jews are believed to have come to India as long as two thousand years ago and now find themselves divided into different small groups. Being a microscopic endogamous community with strict religious and social traditions, most of the Jews find it difficult to maintain their unique culture and therefore, either acculturated with the larger Indian communities or migrated to foreign countries, mainly Israel. There are now barely five thousand Jews, in an Indian population of approximately nine hundred million in all. But those Indian Jews who still live in India or migrated to other countries, however small their number, struggle to maintain their distinct cultural identity—the Indian Jewish Identity.

Fowzia Fathima is a cinematographer, who graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. She is well-regarded as a teacher, having taught in various institutes including the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute. She has recently come into further prominence for pioneering the Indian Women Cinematographers’ Collective – a first of its kind effort in uniting women cinematographers across the Indian film industry.

Crucifixion : Body and Spirit was born out of the photographer'sneed to confront a horrific spectre that has started to haunt human kind. Response from society to this rotten absurdity is more alarming than the crime itself… blaming the betrayed, rather than the betrayer. The pictures in the media are all of the bruised, battered and torn bodies of the stalked, hunted, molested and raped till death flowers. They are visible to us , veiled as they are, by foggy filters, which decide that we are fickle to see the bloody meatiness of the aftermath of a bacchanalian orgy we ourselves have perpetrated and indulged in to our cocks’ hilt. The original innocence of the betrayed femininity is what matters more. That is what haunts the photographer. The eyes of the spirit within them, that gazes fixedly and unblinkingly… demanding to know why the trust was betrayed..!!  You may mutilate the body to your wildest end; but the haunting gaze of her spirit’s eyes bores into you and you wake up in cold sweat to a scorching heat that scalds and sears you.  The spirit of the betrayed child can never sleep again.

Born to Lt. Vakkom K.Lakshmanan and K.Krishnamma in Vakkom in 1969, Johny ML started writing poetry at an early age and got his first poem published when he was thirteen. His father being one of the founder members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) in Kerala, Johny developed an interest in politics and started following his father’s footsteps in village reformation. Reading collected writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in his teens left a deep impression in him and guided by his mother he started reading poetry and literature avidly. Johny finished his school education in Government High School, Vakkom. He took science stream for his Pre-Degree and spent two years in the Sree Narayana College, Sivagiri, Varkala. In 1987, he joined the University College, Thiruvananthapuram and completed his BA and MA in English Language and Literature in 1992.

This series of Vineyard workers started taking shape when photographer Anila joined the team of grape-pickers of her neighbour and friend winemaker Pascal Potaire (Les Capriades) in September 2013. She had recently settled in the country side of Central France and, after months spent indoors, she felt exhilarated by the contact with nature in the Vineyard. She had to be up early and start the hard physical labour, which had rhythmic stretch, bend, stretch and bend movements... the feet and hand touching the soil. The amazing body and mind energy it created, as well as the bounding between the members of this motley crew of various marginal backgrounds, inspired Anila to capture and document the synergy. As she was also working, the remaining moments for the photographic project were left to the poses. Thus, after progressing slowly and painfully between the ranks, the relieved standing pauses of the Vineyard workers. A global village of grounded, yet often uprooted workers has come into light, as she learned that the vines, in their wild form, are not meant to creep on the ground but to grow free and entangled, in the forests and jungles.

Kulasekharapatnam, situated in present day Thoothukudi District of Tamil Nadu, was an active sea port of the Sangam period. This port was contemporaneous to the existence of Kollam, a Chera Port. Kollam served the Pandyas on the west coast while Kulasekharapatnam served them on the east coast, connecting them to Ceylon and the pearl fisheries in the Gulf of Mannar facing the Tirunelveli Coast. Kulasekharapatnam derives its name from the pandyan ruler Maravarman Kulasekara Pandyan I. The three hundred year old Mutharamman temple in Kulasekharapatnam is known for the grand dussehra festival. During this annual festival, devotees from various parts of Tamil Nadu throng the temple to offer special prayers, and on the last day, Soorasamharam, which symbolizes the victory of good over evil and is the highlight of 10 day festival, is performed at the beach. On this day, the Devotees who observed a fast for 41 days, dress like God/ Goddess, beggars, etc., and march towards the temple, and in a state of trance, they move around the temple complex. More than 1.5 million people gather to celebrate this festival, held on a new moon day.

Pipe dreams is a series of photographic works done by Shibu Arakkal in 2015. 'Pipe Dreams' was born as a fantastical hope of trying to relate in an ernest sense to his physical surroundings. And in trying to weave a story of an object that is physically and philosophically part of his life, Shibu hopes that he would learn more about his own self. Shibu says, "These photographic conversations with objects link my conscious and my unconscious, my seen and my unseen and what is real and what I think to be. In trying to create profound memories that reflect the depth of the current moment as well as the transience of our lives linked to the unseen debris or treasures of our lives, based on how we choose to see it, I came upon one overwhelming realisation. That we could be anchored to our pasts, expectant of our future or consciously and emotionally live in the here and now being connected to our surroundings."

In Abul Azad’s visual dictionary the word ‘still life’ is elaborated as follows: the objects related to and resulted by a person’s life and these objects are seen arrayed in a certain fashion as providence would suggest and these objects would remain in the same way as if they were caught in and frozen by time. Their stillness shows that the person who has caused such an arrangement is equally still or methodically careless.

In 1930,PRS Mani Iyer became the first official photographer of Ramana. His portrait of Ramana, commonly known as “Mani Bust”, became the most popular photo, widely circulated and worshiped by millions from across the world. Very little is known about this master photographer and his other photographs that he had taken while he was working as an Executive photographer at Modern Theaters, Salem.

Goldsmiths have been an integral part of Indian society for ages. In South India, the Vishwakarma community has traditionally been entrusted with the responsibility of practising the various crafts. The community mainly comprises of smiths, carpenters and masons, and consider themselves to be descendants of Vishwakarman, the celestial architect. “Achari” is a title used to address a skilled craftsman – a goldsmith is referred to as “Thangaachari”. Today, with the advent of machines, traditional jewellery makers are fast disappearing. Although believed to have better quality, the hand-made jewellery takes a longer time to make. This leads to its added cost, which results in less demand. The skills that were passed down from generation to generation are finding less takers, as more people are turning away from inherited occupations, leaving the traditional skills in danger of being lost. In this series, Lijo Lonappan photographs Ravi Achari from Tiruvannamalai.

On Susan Sontag, a poem by famous Malayalam-English poet N Ravi Shankar

Even when a photograph looks unmediated, without human intervention in the realisation of its image and hence signifying authorial absence, the absence itself is a construction. It is a construction at the interface between factuality and artifice or between simulacrum and point of view; and it is not an empirically given precondition of perception. In many of Ramu’s images, as in the Calgary pictures, the rigorously composed optic array within the frame and the randomness which it suggests of the physical disarray outside the frame (both of which are bound by a causal symmetry) create a subtle dualism.

Thierry Cardon is a French photographer born in Zaire. He spent his teenage years in Morocco before studying in Paris School of Fine Arts. He now lives in Blois, where he devotes himself to his librarian job, his art therapist's activities at a psychiatric hospital for children, and to photography. A dedicated printmaker and an educator, Thierry conducts workshops for young and aspiring photographers. He has published several photo-book and has exhibited in art galleries and other spaces in France. He works with traditional techniques, has mastered different chemical printmaking processes, and admits to consciously taking a slow route towards the end result, comparing it to meditation. Thierry uses digital technology only minimally, stressing that knowledge of traditional techniques is crucial to gaining flexibility and escaping the narrow avenues offered by commercially popular methods and prints. He was part of Ekalokam Trust for Photography's Project 365 Tiruvannamalai Public Photo-art Project done in 2014 - 2015.

Praveen P Mohandas, a wildlife photographer who chooses to stray from the beaten track of wildlife documentation. Like most of the other amateur photographers, Praveen too started nature photography with an intent to document animal life and landscape. But as he traveled to various ecosystems and understood them deeply, the desire for pure documentation gave way, and a need for an emotional representation of the system through the medium of photography became more intense. The presence of elephants are frequent in his photographs, the most popular and revered animal in Kerala. When asked, he said, "All flora and fauna hold equal importance to me. There is no special interest towards elephants as such. I have shot more photographs of elephants, owing to my frequent visits to Jim Corbett national park in Uttarakhand, one of my favorite national parks in the country. This place is a haven to watch and photograph elephants In India. Maybe there are other places with more elephants, but I have come across only this place in my travel. I still go there often".  Most of his photographs are monochromes. He feels that feel black and white takes away the realism in the photograph, breaking all elements to its basic form.

These photographs of a traditional bull fight were taken in 2016 by Indian photographer Leo James, who is currently living in Dubai, in 2016, using 35mm film. Bullfighting’s roots can be traced to prehistoric bull worship and sacrifice in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean region. There were several variants of bull fights – man vs bull and bull vs bull, and variants among them. The earliest surviving record of a bullfight is in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes a scene in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu fought and killed the Bull of Heaven. Bullfighting is often linked to Rome, where many human-versus-animal events were held as competition and for entertainment. These hunting games had spread to Africa, Europe, and Asia during the prehistoric era. Bull baiting became common among the Aayar or Yadava people who lived in the ‘Mullai’ geographical division of the ancient Tamil country. It gradually developed into a platform for display of bravery, and prizes were introduced for encouraging participation. A seal from the Indus Valley Civilization depicting the practice is preserved in the National Museum, New Delhi. A cave painting in white kaolin, discovered near Madurai, depicting a lone man trying to control a bull, is estimated to be about 2,500 years old. These images were shot in Fujairah, UAE. The origins of bullfighting in Arabia are unknown, though locals believe it was brought to Oman by the Moors who had conquered Spain. Its existence in Oman and the UAE is also attributed to Portugal which colonized the Omani coastline for nearly two centuries.

In the Early Historic (Sangam Age) Tamil country (comprising modern Tamil Nadu and Kerala), numerous developments, including the composition of Tamil texts and the emergence of port towns along the coast . The Early Historic period is placed between third century BCE and third century CE. MuchiRi or MusiRi was an Early Historic port town on the Kerala coast of India, and the town was under the control of the Chera vEntars (a political power) .

Such a photographic mapping, done with the awareness of our history and culture, would be valuable in many ways including its political and cultural aspects of our contemporaneity. The concept of EtP, ancient India in contemporary times, is counter posing our past and present in a new perspective. The blend of history and art is not in vogue in our ego driven market world of art and culture. It is in this situation that the project marks its significance in the photographic history of South Asia.

Bangalore-based photographer Jiby Charles is one among them. Born in Cochin, he has travelled across India, his photographic interest being wildlife, landscapes and the Indian wilderness. In this interview, Jiby shares his experience as a Project 365 photographer.

Right from the invention of photography there has been a common understanding that it reflected the world as such or more exactly it was taken to be so intimately associated with the object depicted. The fin de siècle avant-gardism in art was, among a lot of other things, a reaction to this notion of the ‘photographed reality’. But at the same time one could also remonstrate against this by accentuating the ‘pictorialism vs. straight photography episode’ from the history of photography.

Visual art works based on scriptures have for long been illustrative. Michelangelo’s work in Sistine Chapel and the Indian miniature painters are examples of this tradition. Black Mother I & II by contrast represents the contemporary society and its females, just as the characters in Silappathikaram is bound to have been derived from the immediate society of that age.

The myopic eye of the smart phone demands that the photographer has to be within a certain “intimate” distance to take a photograph. There has to be a certain connection between the one who is being photographed and the photographer himself – using a smart phone to create portraits of people means that the photographer is not a mere witness; the one who is photographed often looks straight into the camera and thus, at the photographer.

This is the essence of Project 365: each photographer creating according to his or her own desires, yet all working toward a common goal. The mix of approaches is the project’s strength. Variant perspectives give the wider view: from Jiby Charles’ exploratons of the areas ecology, to Dinesh Khanna’s obsession with vibrant colour and how those colours manifest in the faiths and lives of everyday people. M.K. Iqbal is making an intimate study of Tiru’s small Muslim population, while Leo James runs a parallel body of work lovingly portraying the even smaller population of Christians. R. R. Srinivasan is creating an intense “Archeological Mapping of Tiruvannamalai”. Srinivasan’s ambitious approach includes not only photographs, but detailed references to historical texts and written descriptions that read like an archeologist’s probing analysis of each and every image.

Anup Mathew Thomas gives a sense of non-commitment as he does not intent to divulge the personal narratives of these nurses. This series, in a sense stands opposite to what Parthiv Shah had done in his path breaking project titled ‘Figures, Facts, Feelings: Direct Diasporic Dialogue’ (2000). In this project, Parthiv had approached around thirty four Indian people who had settled in the UK for more than three decades. He asked them twenty questions pertaining to their lives. The answers were juxtaposed with the images of these people taken by Parthiv in the locations that they liked most in their habitats.

That said it should be acknowledged that the art projected in the biennials is informed by a particular historical rupture with the art of modernity which, in spite of its radical breaks, “manifests the hegemony of a geopolitical region and thus establishes political boundaries in culture as well. Global art, by contrast negates, ignores and destabilizes boundaries drawn by the state …” (Vogel, ibid) There is in principle a focus on the local life, history and culture, going by the paradigm of the local/global, which is expressed through on-site works that are commissioned around themes bearing on those aspects. However, the question remains as to how far these visiting artists can either identify the broad themes or understand the intrinsic ebb and flow of the life-world of the host country/society.