The article looks at Chennai-based photographer and filmmaker Balaji Maheshwar, and his role as co-founder of Book Room, a photobook space in Chennai. It also highlights the Pause Workshop – Edition 3, a three-day residential photography workshop (April 3–5, 2026 at Cuckoo Forest School) that brings photographers together for guided reflection, dialogue, and image-making in a forest setting.
In Chennai, photographer and filmmaker Balaji Maheshwar speaks about photography the way some people speak about prayer. Years ago, while working through personal grief and emotional turbulence, he turned seriously toward zazen, a form of seated Buddhist meditation. The discipline of sitting still, watching the breath, and allowing difficult thoughts to surface slowly began to shape the way he saw the world. His photographs carry that same inward gaze — attentive, patient, and unafraid of vulnerability.
Balaji’s body of work stretches across still images and cinema. Projects like Dear Cinema and Tunnel draw from memory, relationships, loss, and the fragile terrain of selfhood. His work has been exhibited at the Chennai Photo Biennale and screened at international festivals including the Angkor Photo Festival. Over the years he has participated in workshops and mentorships across South and Southeast Asia, receiving support from institutions such as the India Foundation for the Arts. Alongside his artistic practice, he co-runs 'Book Room' in Mandavelipakkam, Chennai — a small, intimate space dedicated to photobooks and conversations around photography.
Out of this ecosystem comes 'Pause Workshop – Edition 3', a three-day residential photography workshop scheduled from April 3 to 5, 2026 at Cuckoo Forest School. Set in the foothills of the Javadu hills, the forest school offers an immersive natural environment that encourages participants to step away from routine and digital noise.
Pause is designed as a reflective gathering for people who use the camera as a form of self-expression. The workshop explores self-worth, doubt, creative anxiety, and the pressures of validation in a hyperconnected world and sustaining a creative practice. Participants spend time in guided reflection, group dialogue, image-making exercises, and observation. The residential format allows for shared meals, extended conversations, and periods of solitude within nature. It encourages making photographs without the expectation of producing a finished body of work. It is structured, but open ended, allowing each participant to approach the process in their own way.
Through Book Room and Pause, Balaji is extending his own practice into a shared space. The workshop grows out of the same concerns visible in his projects — memory, doubt, self-examination — but places them inside a collective setting. Book Room has already functioned as a space for conversations around photobooks and image-making in Chennai; Pause takes that impulse further, moving it into a longer, immersive format. bringing together photographers who are willing to slow down and examine their relationship with their work in a setting that allows for attention and dialogue. In doing so, he is building a small, sustained network of photographers who think seriously about why they make images and how they want to shape their creative lives.
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