Redefining the aesthetics of photography

New Indian Express

28-04-2025

When the camera slips from the grip of casteist and colonial gatekeepers, it finds new ways to see. It lingers on daily life, catches the blush of celebrations, the weight of grief, the shape of land and longing.
This Dalit History Month, as part of the Vaanam Art Festival by the Neelam Cultural Centre, Niththam (Everydayness) showcases precisely this shift. Here, photographs hum, installations snarl, and poems whisper what mainstream archives have tried to bury.
Let the image breathe
Jaisingh Nageswaran, photographer and a first-time curator with the restless energy of someone who's spent years dismantling casteist lenses, describes the exhibition as 'a visual poetry'. 'Photography isn't just about taking pictures. It's about how you display them,' he says. Images here are unruly: a boy's laughter showcased across a vast white slab, a film flickering quietly in a corner. The room invites you to pause, lean in, and unlearn the aesthetics imposed upon us.
Now, with smartphones and digital access, photography is no longer the preserve of the elite. But once, photography was an outsider's gaze. 'My grandparents weren't allowed into a photo studio when they got married,' he recalls. 'They had to go all the way to Palani to take a picture.'
So, Niththam asks: if everyone can be a photographer now, what does it mean when twelve artistes focussing on stories from the margins, tell their tales — on their terms?
Rethinking beauty
For Jaisingh, aesthetics must emerge from lived reality. Influenced by Arthur Jafa's work on Black aesthetics, Jaisingh believes in disrupting — not discarding — existing forms. 'We question the aesthetic, not to break it, but to find new meaning in it.'
Sadia Mariam Rupa's 'Noise' opens the show with tenderness and tension. A woman bends to bless a child. A dove perches in a cage. Domestic moments from the Korail Basti — washing corners, modest desks, patterned curtains — build a visual diary of survival. Below, drawings and mixed media works chronicle bureaucracy and history: redacted forms, ID cards, annotations. 'It's an attempt to listen to the sound of the place,' says Rupa.
Kabilan Soundararajan's 'Echo of Silence' features portraits of Parai drummers and koothu artistes suspended like a chorus line. 'Since it showcases music, I wanted these photographs to move,' Jaisingh notes. Abhishek Khedekar turns to his hometown, Dapoli, composing layered images of memory and myth. He includes archival photos by Subhash Kolekar, the first photographer from the region, blending fiction and history.
Rajyashri Goody's 'Eat With Great Delight', borrowing its title from Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan, critiques hunger, shame and the politics of leftovers. Displayed near the wall are poems from Vasant Moon's 'Growing Up Untouchable in India.' Jaya Shruti Laya's 'People of the Frontline' confronts climate inequality. The images ask: Would heat waves be taken seriously if they affected the privileged?
Land, labour, loss
Abila documents displacement from Manjolai estate; her photographs, acts of witness, taken during ration trips back home. Selvakumar, raised in the nearby Oothu Estate, captures how generations of labour shaped the landscape. His 'Stories of Our Scars' speaks of betrayal, pain, and the myths built atop mountain silence.
Arunkumar Marimuthu's 'An Object or Two' is quiet yet radical. While in a village near Kolkata, he photographs women not through portraiture, but through the objects around them. These objects hold endurance and unspoken stories. And Nirmalprasaath T's 'Lignite' documents how the Neyveli mines erase entire villages. His lens focuses on land under threat, and the cycle of forced development and forgotten people.
Moving mediums
Mehul Singhal's 'Anatomy of Barber and Shop' deconstructs the barbershop as a social ecosystem. The monochromatic images show that it is not just a place of grooming — it's a living, breathing site of community, ritual and rhythm.
Filmmaker Di Sica Ray's 'The Creation of Adam' is a film told through hands alone. Michelangelo's verse echoes in Italian while hands reach from artificiality toward nature — a yearning for escape and reconnection. The film is screened throughout the exhibition in one corner.
The show ends with Prabhakar Kamble's kinetic installation, 'Disfiguration of Image'. A motorised brush smears saffron paint across a miniature Ambedkar statue — only to reset and begin again; a comment on how ideologies try to erase what threatens them. Jaisingh says, 'Earlier Orange was associated with Buddha. Now we associate it with the BJP. The paint that is spilled on the floor indicates violence. Everyday violence of Dalits is what we wanted to show.'
The British brought cameras to catalogue 'natives' like exhibits. For decades, Dalit presence was limited to famine porn or fetishised suffering. Niththam flips that frame. Here, there are no lowered gazes. These images don't flinch. Neither should we.
Niththam is on view at Lalit Kala Akademi, Chennai, until April 29.