CHENNAI : A baby crow with its eyes closed, eagerly opened its beak, awaiting the morsels of chewed-up food being carefully fed by its mother. As the care unfolded, the father was a devoted guardian, his watchful eyes scanning the surroundings for any potential threat. Photographer Kiranmayi Veeramani patiently waited for the perfect moment to freeze the tender avian bonds that unfolded just beyond her windowpane. She clicked the camera button and added the latest picture to her archives Kaagam, a collection of pictures of crows.
Since 2010, a curious Kiranmayi has been capturing life around her. Recently for Shared Tides, a collaboration among the Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB) Foundation, Goethe-Institut/MMB Chennai, Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka, and Kalam Jaffna, she travelled to Sri Lanka to explore the lives and stories of Tamil-speaking people there.
Her work ‘Between the Wrinkles’ is an assemblage of oral histories, photographs, and recordings gathered through conversations with Sri Lanka’s elderly. It started when she documented her grandparents. She says, “Many of the works came from something personal. My grandparents living in Royapuram, eat all their meals together. They have small routines which they have been continuing for years. I clicked the pictures and submitted that for the Shared Tides, which is how I got selected.”
In Sri Lanka, she interacted with many elderly people who survived the war. “I interacted with people from different professions like a postman, school teachers, and people who make crafts from palm trees. I mostly listened to the history of the country and their lives, how it froze during the war. These interactions somehow changed my perspective of life.”
Phases of photography
Even as a kid, Kiranmayi’s favourite pastime was sitting with all the old photo albums and observing the pictures. “The photo albums were the one thing that fascinated me. If someone came home, I would run and be excited to show them the pictures. Also, my dad had a camera, and when I was in class 5, I remember covering my cousin’s birthday on that camera,” shares the engineering graduate-turned-photographer.
Her love story with the camera extended till college and branched out into a career after Kiranmayi joined classes and received feedback from people. “In my college, Kumaraguru College of Technology, I was the only girl who joined the photography club, which was conducted in the mechanical department. Initially, I was very nervous but gradually with the discussions we had, I started to learn a lot,” she shares. By the third year, she got her first camera Nikon d3100, and further ventured out to do a diploma course at Ambitions 4 Photography Academy. She says, “My teacher KL Raja Ponsingh boosted my confidence. He has been practicing photography from the 70s and 80s. He updates himself so much. My foundation got very strong.”
During the initial days, it was all about imitating other people’s works and trying to attain perfection. But over the years, photography became an art for her that captures life in its raw form. “For every photographer, going behind aesthetics is inevitable. But as soon as you start documenting lives and archiving photos, you will realise that aesthetics isn’t made, it’s just found. While doing model photography, I hated editing the photos to make them look perfect. Without appreciating natural beauty, people were going behind conventional ideas of beauty. I started clicking pictures and continued without editing them. Slowly people started liking the way I functioned and started contacting me for work,” she says.
Documenting moments
Kiranmayi started documenting her hostel life, and the simplicity of daily life. During the pandemic when her sister Niraimathi got pregnant, she made it her mission to document her journey. From her weight gain, burger cravings at odd hours, mood swings, the panic before going to the hospital, to delivering the baby Inba, Kiranmayi observed her sister through her lens. She says, “We only have a two-year age gap, and seeing someone who grew up with you go through so many changes in a certain duration was amazing.”
Kaagam, the crow series, was an accidental discovery from Kiranmayi’s collections. She says, “I used to observe crows and felt that their mannerisms were cute. They are also intelligent. But we don’t give the same affection to crows as we give to other birds like pigeons. Crows are always with us. Even in places like Marina Beach, near a flock of pigeons, there will be a small gathering of crows. While we feed the pigeons, we forget the crows.”
Kiranmayi started capturing their mannerisms like drinking water, survival in different climates, behaviour around baby crows, and so on.
When she started recording a baby crow’s birth and its growth, she was healing from a knee injury and the artiste asserts that photography helped ease the journey.
Apart from recording moments, Kiranmayi has also been teaching the basics of the craft to government school students since 2022. She also launched a sustainable calendar this year which can also be used as a monthly journal. She is currently working on a series on electrical lines and how they disrupt our lives. She also hopes to take her photos to more people and hopefully, a lot of them will be curious enough to know the stories beyond the photographs.
For details visit, Kiranmayi.in