CHENNAI: As I walk through the intimate space at Amortela one evening, I am told a story. At first, it seems like a usual one about love and loss, but on a second walk through the exhibition, I read a deeper message about the deluded times we live in. This story of the love between a man and a woman and the woman’s death to a calamity was told through 13 photographs at the photo exhibition by the Chennai-based VS Anandha Krishna. Titled ‘Greed’, the exhibition was an attempt to bring out how being human-centric, makes us exploit nature’s abundance.
The first few photos introduce us to the setting — a tribal man, as evident from his cliched attire, lives in the cleared-out space of a forest. Deeply in love with a woman, who is soon pregnant with their child, the photographs are in warm shades of orange and yellow, by the sunset — showing them happy and content. Anandha explains that the idea behind the choice of setting, colours, and attire was to show our oneness with nature. “They are people who live in a forest and have learned to survive the hard way. The man looks brave and well-built, but he is quite innocent. He simply knows to love,” shares Anandha.
In a drastic turn of events, the next photograph has deeper shadows, and the man is shocked watching something burn at a distance. Taken very well, the photograph is a close up of his face. And details like fire reflecting in his eyes, the confusion in his expression, and him looking at a distance, away from the camera, bring his feeling of shock in us, too. It is, however, predictable that he’s watching her burn in fire.
Anandha’s effort is to not portray it as an accident, but as a consequence of our greed and need to exploit nature. Coming from Dharmapuri, where the photographs were taken too, he shares that there is a huge gap between ‘development’ in cities and interdependence with nature in smaller towns and villages.
“People pray to their land and hold it together, while we carelessly and greedily destroy it for our own benefits. The consequences are all around us - be it the rising temperatures in Chennai during summer, or the recent forest fire in Theni,” he says.
The idea for the project, however, came to him two years back when he felt that in cities, we were increasingly becoming disconnected from nature. He was particularly disturbed by the way animals and birds are affected by this changing lifestyle. He shares, “I wanted to convey this as a story, with human characters, because unfortunately, we empathise more with humans than animals.”
He has previously worked on fashion and commercial photography, stock images, and graphic designing in an IT firm. This is his first self-funded project as a social effort. “I usually first work on lighting and background, but here the real challenge was to get the models’ performance right. The background came much later after a few days of recce in Dharmapuri. And all elements like land, stone, fire, and rocks were shot in their natural environment,” he explains.
The post-production took his team seven to eight months, and the final frame alone had to be worked on for three months. Taken from a top angle, it shows him leaning against a rock in a state of helplessness, as a front hoe loader goes about doing its job, out of focus in the background. “That was one of the most important shots. It brings the story to a full circle ending, and even if it was a small drop in an ocean, I wanted to make this point about how greed takes away everything from both the perpetrator and those on the other end,” he says.
However, Anandha relies on certain cliches to make his point — his choice of attire and makeup, warm and dusky colours symbolising nature, and the most troubling — a tribal being the innocent victim who loses his woman, meaning everything in the end. That said, the imagery and attention to detail in all his photographs makes one think about the exhibition well after they leave the store.