15 Indian Photographers Interpret What 'Urban Water' Means To Them
In the last few months of 2015, Chennai and other regions of Tamil Nadu saw one of the worst floods to hit the state in its history, destroying land and property, taking lives, and crippling its citizens for weeks on end. The deluge was brought on by relentless torrential rain that the city was too unprepared to handle, for many different reasons that analysers of the situation have mused.
Environmentalists have gone blue in the face trying to bring the dire issue of neglected rivers, canals and other water bodies in Chennai since long before the floods, pointing out the city’s growing industrialisation encroaching on natural reservoirs and drainage systems.
Reckless town planning, over-capacity constructions and apathetic politicians can all be lined up in the blame game for Chennai being unprepared for the monsoon, bringing out the larger debate of surrounding the general issue of urban water.
Factories that pollute rivers, industries cropping up on the coast and displacing fishing villages, natural spaces invaded by growing urbanisation, and several other factors contribute to the growing water crisis in urban cities. And this topic needs a much brighter spotlight.
In the backdrop of the devastating floods, the Chennai Photo Biennale asked 15 photographers journeying around the streets of Chennai to interpret ‘Urban Water’ through their own lens, lending us 15 different takes on the concept and the problems surrounding it.
As these young shutterbugs, under the guidance of experienced mentors Munem Wasif and Ravi Agarwal, bring into focus the imminent crises surrounding water in urban spaces, we get a unique insight into the city of Chennai. Scroll on for 15 starkly distinct perspectives, all interpreting Urban Water through visual representations, taking forward the much needed dialogue on the same.
[The concept note regarding each photographer’s image has been condensed. Visit the Chennai Photo Biennale’s Urban Water exhibition presented by PhotoConcierge opening at the Lighthouse MRTS at 11am on February 26, 2016 for the entire experience.]
I. Anshika Varma
“Alcott Kuppam is one of the oldest fishing villages in Chennai. Generations of fisherfolk have lived along the seashore and their lives have gotten intricately woven in with the life of the sea. But, there aren’t many fishermen left in Alcott Kuppam today. The younger generation has educated itself, and moved to the city for more secure jobs, where they’re safe from the wrath of the water.The sea now has less mystery, more danger, with its dying fish and large competitive fishing ships, turning the fishing village into more of a tourist-inviting beach, unsure of what its identity is in the growing urban scape.
The village is now surrounded by the city. And slowly being engulfed by it.”
Visit her page to view more of her work.
II. Arun M
“A big industrial building eats up small land in the competitive fast growing world, standing aggressively. With its mechanical mouth, it absorbs ground water, making the land infertile, and after its digestion, it ruthlessly lets waste out into the land and backwater canals, which is absorbed by the sea.
This service is generously done by industries in the name of urban development. Amidst industrial sounds, every human puppet has become deaf and dumb. To prove its strength, it burns day and night to fulfill the hunger of the city. Humans have became machines, where all they’ve left for future generation is lifeless H2O and SiO2 locked up in bottles.”
III. Arun Vijai Mathavan
“About few decades ago, Chennai had nearly 650 water bodies, while today only a fraction of them exists. Most of the water bodies within the city, which acted as both reservoirs as well as bodies to accommodate excess rain water, have vanished owing to the rapid expansion of the city and heavy construction to accommodate the expansion.
For example Velachery, a recently developed location in Chennai, was a lake, marsh land and water draining space during the monsoon, is now turned into a highly developed residential area and IT industrial area, due to which it suffered major damages during the recent floods. Here, Arun is trying to discover the thread and traces of the massive transformation.”
IV. Balaji Maheshwar
“And now it’s time for Tsunami!” boomed the microphone. This was greeted by loud cheering, and people quickly dribbled away from their happy pools, running towards the source of the announcement. Watch closely the animated expressions of the crowd squealing with joy, in anticipation of what was to follow. The slow crescendo peaked and the crowd could hardly contain its excitement. What were they waiting for? Ah! The huge wave! A slow grin; I couldn’t suppress my smile as I watched them run towards the wave, chants of excitement drowned by clapping and hooting and whistling. This was a show indeed. Placed out of context, wasn’t this a word to fear?
My train of thoughts turned and I mused if water had colour. Clearly water had its own colour. Defying my early acquired knowledge of ‘water is a colourless, odourless liquid’ I had to come to terms with the fact that water indeed was very colourful. Isn’t that how we like it? And unquestionably, here, it was blue.”
View more of his work here.
V. Dhruv Dhakan
“The body of work produced is based on the two of the most important rivers of Chennai. Adayar river and Cooum River. I have documented the life surrounding this two rivers. This rivers flow right through the city, and during the floods they have been major sources of all the destruction. Still after few months, the rivers have left scars in the life of people linked to it in many ways or the other. People have lost their belongings, houses have been damaged, lives lost, but the city is slowly and gradually rebuilding itself. Power to the people of Chennai.”
VI. Gayatri Ganju
“Flora: One of the two rivers winding through Chennai, the Adyar is mostly walled off and out of sight, representative of its fractured relationship with the city. Waste, washed ashore has become the topography of the banks.
‘Flora’ is a photographic study of the landscape of the banks. I chose to remove the objects I collected from their context and photograph them clinically, as a researcher would treat botanical specimens. During the process of collecting and photographing these objects, I was in equal parts drawn to and disturbed by how closely their form resembled organic matter. I found the debris of personal histories that stuck out of the plastic. A stark reminder of human transience but the permanence of what we leave behind.”
VII. Jordi Pizzaro
“The resistance of a fishing community: The fishing hamlet with 400 families and their land is required to widen the road to facilitate movement of containers into the Chennai Port. The Chennai Port caused sea erosion along the coast, and the village moved nearly 4 km inland. The families are spent their entire lives in the open spaces, and have a strong connection with the sea, with the water and the nature that surround the village. The NTO Kuppam village is their home, their identity: “If we lose our identity we will lose how we are”.”
VIII. Kannagi Khanna
“Chennai is no exception to the rapid industrialisation expanding across the country, which is one of the major causes of water pollution. While every industry has a compulsory treatment plant; the question remains how many of them abide by guidelines and treat their discharge before it is drained into water bodies.
I decided to portray my thoughts on the issue through a key water quality parameter – ‘Ph levels’. First, I prepared my own Ph paper at home using filter paper and red cabbage. After it dried, I printed the portraits I had shot of different people living in the city onto the Ph sheets, then collected water samples of a few industries and allowed the paper to interact with these samples. The Ph sheets immediately turned into shades of pink, indicating acidic content.”
IX. Karen Dias
“Kadal (in Tamil: the sea, temporary title) is a series of photographs imagining the dreams and realities of children living by the ocean. Children of a fishing community who have lived by the sea in Kasimedu, north Chennai for more generations than most can remember were the original people of Chennai. The men who went out to sea everyday bringing back thousands of fish while the women sold the catch are now seeing an end to their livelihood, as the sea is emptied out by commercial trawlers, and the coast begins to eat itself.
The tsunami that took place over ten years ago is fresh in the mind’s eye, but even fresher in the dreams of the children. The children, most of whom weren’t born during the unforgettable tsunami, have vivid dreams and imaginations about the sea and the havoc it can cause. Nightmares of waves washing away their homes and drowning are common, yet an inherent love and respect for the sea is undeniable. A job and a fixed income far from the sea is what most of them dream of besides deadly, underwater creatures among others. There is a lot to learn from this generation, to question what role the ocean plays in our future, why they dream the way they do and what it is that will keep them safe from the changing tides.”
Visit her page to see more of her photographs.
X. Nikhil Roshan
“Surface Tension: In the immediate aftermath of the devastating floods in late 2015, the long embattled water bodies of Chennai came back into the limelight. One of those, the historic Buckingham Canal caught my eye, not least because if it was allowed to function as it had been planned to by the British, it could have drained the swelling Cooum and Adayar river deltas and, to some degree, prevented the deluge that hit a seemingly unprepared city.
Till early 2015, 300 families lived in ramshackle, temporary homes along the banks of the Buckingham Canal at Elephant Gate. Even though many of them perhaps traced their lineage to early settlers, their precarious claims on the land they lived on were ignored. The evicted families have been moved to massive Slum Board Tenements in Kannagi Nagar, Thoraipakkam, where communities from various parts of Chennai displaced under varying circumstances are clubbed together into blocks after identical housing blocks spread across numerous acres.
Ironically, as I walked around the tenements in Kannagi Nagar with a camera and massive tripod, I felt a sense of space, warmth and hygiene there. The modernist housing blocks in Kannagi Nagar perhaps held out to town planners, as I confess it did to me, possibilities of a new sense of community that the residents there could invent and nurture. But personal accounts from many residents about being disconnected from their erstwhile livelihoods spoke of desperate lives on the edge. The jarring contradiction between my personal sense of a place, and its reality as perceived by those who live there, caused me to pull back and create panoramas that would merely dwell on the surface of these spaces, concealing whatever personal and collective histories they may hold within to be unearthed by the viewer.”
View more of his work here.
XI. Ronny Sen
“Marina is 13km long, the longest natural urban beach in India. For many reasons, known and unknown to me, it had an impact on me this time. Initially, I wanted to know what such a huge open space does to a city? I kept going back and photographed what I was intuitively drawn to. The word ‘beach’ is for consumers, like glossy advertisements on expensive holiday packages. I was anxious about all the anonymous people who come and speak to the ocean, listen to it, touch the water, fight with it, go far inside dogging the waves, looking for freedom or maybe that’s what I think. I am afraid of water. I can’t swim.
Maybe they also want to see like me, hundreds of crows together without any building, without anything in between, no obstruction. Death has nothing in between, no obstruction, no beginning and no end, it’s constant, like the ocean. I love crows, because they are sharp, cunning, beautiful, because they are black, and black is not a colour. They remind me of death, I am afraid of them. I wanted to photograph Marina at night, but I was not comfortable, not that I was scared or maybe I was, but I couldn’t see the crows in the dark.”
XII. Sathish Kumar
Black Pipes: In the early morning, people were getting water from a public pump and saving it in their private blue containers. Few homes have their own motors for transporting water from the containers in the ground to their home upstairs, through long pipes.
The ‘Black Pipes’ photography series is shot at the Slum Clearance Board, Saidapet, where people don’t have ground water infrastructure to take water directly to their home without manual intervention.
See more of his photographs here.
XIII. Sebastian Forkarth
“In media coverage talking about the deluge of Chennai in late 2015, ‘illegal constructions’ were cited as one of the major reasons for the water clogging. At the intersection of public and private space, construction is based on individuals’ private or economic needs, and in itself expresses the fundamental understanding of the idea of the city as a democratic, organic space with its ever transforming and challenging character.
While a building is neutral in its very nature, it can only be declared illegal in its relative relation to sovereignty and environment. As long as it is seen without context, it stays free of conflict, but it gets connected with a status the moment it conflicts with others’ interests. In the photographic practice of Take Strict Action Against the House, the medium of Polaroid film is altered to isolate or erase a specific architectural construction from its environment. Therefore, reduced on itself as a neutral object, it is the spectator’s perspective that puts it back in a subjective context.”
View more of his work here.
XIV. Swastik Pal
“Receding Coast: The three-km coast between Ennore and Ernavoor in North Chennai is under siege due to rapid sea erosion. Several families, mainly fisher folks fear displacement and loss of livelihood.
In this brief project I’ve tried to make a visual journey along this stretch of the sea, attempting to respond intuitively to the relationship between the ravaging sea and the people living along the coast. It’s a visual exploration of the sea, the industries along the sea and the illegal encroachments and finally the people affected by a culmination of natural and man-made calamity.”
XV. Zishaan Akbar Latif
“There is urban water and there is rural water, but an intriguing question is how much of rural water actually reaches rural hands?
Chennai is among the first of Indian cities to depend on desalination for most of its water needs. Sureli Kattakuppam, a village about 35 km south of urban Chennai, is one of many other similar ones that pays the price those needs. In 2013, the Nemmeli desalination plant, with the capacity to treat 100 million litres of seawater daily, was established under the Chennai Metrowater on the shores of this fishing village, depriving it of its basic connect with the ocean.
While the promise of jobs at the plant was fulfilled for the few villagers that were given work, it was before they could fully understand the ill-effects of the plant’s reverse osmosis technique. As it sucked in saline water from the sea, it pumped back highly saline toxic water, adversely affecting marine ecology around the village, harming their livelihood. Even ground water sources have been contaminated. As villagers protested, plant authorities began slapping false cases against them, landing some of them in jail for 21 to 40 days.
Interventions like this bring relief to a parched Chennai, but at what cost?”
[PhotoConcierge presents the Urban Water exhibition, which will be showcased on February 26. The Chennai Photo Biennale will take place in Chennai from February 26 to March 13. Visit their website for details regarding their various exhibits, workshops and more.]
