Lenscape Kerala: A Journey Through Ritual, Light and Everyday Life

In January, the Travancore Palace of Central Delhi played host to Kerala, photographically. Which is to say, Kerala did not arrive in the usual snapshots of glossy postcards with backwaters and houseboats, it appeared in a sequence of lived moments photographed with care. From a Theyyam artist adjusting his costume, fishermen studying the sea at dawn, to mundane yet magnificent architectural details, and an ordinary day at a school and much more, all of Kerala’s intimacies were put on the walls of Travancore Palace. The photography exhibition “Lenscape Kerala” presented the state along the Southern ghats as one shaped as much by ritual and tradition as by memory, labour and its scenery.

Organised by Kerala Tourism, the exhibition brought together the work of ten photographers who were commissioned to run around the length and breadth of the state with their camera, comb for the best shots and come up with a face of Kerala never seen before. Over a five-day shoot, the only (golden) rule of the commission was open-ended: observe, engage and document life in Kerala as you encounter them. The result was a collection of 100 arresting shots that, if not bring out a new face of the state, attune the observer with the average-everyday of overseen details.

Beyond The Postcard

As you walked into the exhibition, one thing that instantly made itself apparent was the exhibition’s refusal to rely on familiar tourism imagery. Curator and art critic Uma Nair, who arranged the exhibition alongside wildlife and conservation photographer Balan Madhavan, conveyed it to me right off the bat that there wasn't any thoroughgoing put on the photographers. The idea was to lose one's foreign eyes and document the state as one confronted it; life as it happened.

Life in Kerala is inseparable from its landscape; you could hardly tell the two apart. Architecture, food, festivals and wildlife form one continuous cultural ecosystem. In these images, you could witness the backwaters not in isolation—as in tourist images—but as routes and sinews along which life is carried out and community takes shape. There, forests were not just befuddling green expanses but spots where tradition burned as if the hearth of a home.

Ritual, Colour And Inheritance

Some of the exhibition’s most brilliant images revolved around ritual traditions. Photographer Kounteya Sinha chose to capture the quieter, preparatory moments of Theyyam rather than climatic performances. In a twin frame, one could see two performers stand in a rare pause in one while in the other, a child who has just joined them back from school instinctively mimics the costume and posture, suggesting how ritual knowledge passes on between generations. “It’s a delightful piece that conveys the route of local wisdom and tradition,” Nair told me as she guided me through the exhibition.

Colour also becomes a subtle narrative device. Red, for instance, and the recurrence of it in the form of temple offerings, political symbols and festive clothing, became a motif within the visual thread of the series.

Encounters In The Wild

Wildlife photographs in the exhibition appeared not as isolated, iconic shots but as tender moments of ecological interaction. Shivang Mehta's frames, for instance, all in black and white muted the colours to bring the pulse and drama of life to the foreground. 'Black and white heighten the dramatic tension,' Nair and I agreed. In one of his photographs, a langur sat with its newborn looking longingly towards the sky—a shot of great emotion. In another one, a close-up of an elephant's tusk with cracks and crevices—the lint of time—silently reinstates the need for animal conservation and the need to prevent ill-practices. The most arresting shot in this series was a night view of an owl in its habitat, a rather haunting look into the eerie nightlife of jungles seen in the eyes of the owl, Nair and I amused.

Light, Time And The Everyday

As emphasised before, the exhibition did best at bringing out the mundanity of everyday life in Kerala. Saibal Das’s ordinary frames are actually the most inordinary ones when pondered over. A simple frame of bananas kept against a chipped, old wall begins to reveal life around it. Das's most interesting shot comes in the form of three men of various age groups enjoying tea outside a shop. The shots reiterate the fact that to know a place intimately, one hardly needs to go to check out its iconic landmarks and read its general knowledge; a place best unfolds itself in the rumination on its ordinary life.

Brick And Mortar

Another most impressive series was presented under the name of Manoj Arora. Most of Arora's clicks were black and white architectural magnificence. "I travelled like a local and tried to photograph ordinary buildings, schools, religious sites, museums...," he told me. While the traditional Kerala-style architecture came out brilliantly in his contemplative clicks, his most iconic shot was that of a temple at a beach, taken simply with the clean background of the sky. Arora's shots tried not to bisect the buildings but present them as they sit within their daily routine.

The Travelling Portrait Of The State

“Lenscape Kerala” is conceived as a travelling exhibition, planned to move across different Indian cities after Delhi. Each edition is expected to feature new photographers, new photos, new perspectives, gradually building a layered visual archive of the state, scattering its various aspects of personality as it travels. The aim of the exhibition is to encourage travellers to ditch the usual routes and look beyond the obvious, into Kerala’s cultural and ecological depth.