Framing the Tide

WHO HOLDS THE CAMERA remains a powerful question in visual culture, especially when it unsettles long-standing hierarchies of representation. The acts of photographing and of being photographed are at the centre of debates on authorship and power. For much of modern photojournalism, particularly in South Asia, the “subject” was rendered visible primarily through the gaze of outsiders. In this field, fisherwomen have too often been seen through external lenses—foreign correspondents, aid workers, metropolitan media, NGO professionals. Rarely have they authored their own stories.

“The moment they tied their sarees, holding a kattapai (sturdy carry-bag) in one hand and a camera in the other, they began to record their world,” the photojournalist M Palani Kumar said, “creating a body of work that I regard as a vital document.” The women captured long-hidden stories by venturing into spaces, familiar and unfamiliar.

Kumar, along with Dakshin Foundation and Social Need Education and Human Awareness, began Chronicles of the Tides: Migration, Conflict, and Climate, an initiative with 16 women from fishing communities—Sundaram, Laxmi, Suganthi Manickavel, Poongodi, Mahalaxmi, Manjamatha, Poonkothai Arsu and Parimala from Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, and Rajamma, Lalitha, CH Pratima, Shravani, Nagamma, Kamana, Damoyonti Behera and Gouri Behera from Ganjam in Odisha—who were trained to photograph their communities.