Portraits from the field to document the disappeared
You could say Vijay Jodha’s gift is that he sees dead people. The 55-year-old photographer is focusing his lens on India’s farmer suicide crisis, and working to ensure that the deaths are not forgotten.
The First Witnesses, a black-and-white series that he began in 2017, features portraits of family members of farmers who have died by suicide. In a classic frame-within-a-frame style, they hold up for the camera, and the world, photos of loved ones glaring out from behind garlanded frames. Some just hold up passport-sized photos.
As the Indian farmer’s indebtedness and vulnerability to the vagaries of the monsoon are exacerbated by the climate crisis, the Gurugram-based artist says he wants to break fresh ground on the issue.
Jodha recently co-won the best photo series award given as part of the British Journal of Photography’s Decade of Change initiative, launched in 2020 to use art to highlight the climate crisis. Ten stills from the series were displayed at the world’s first museum of climate change, in Hong Kong, from June until mid-september; and then at Climate Week NYC, held since 2009 to coincide with the UN General Assembly.
Jodha, also a filmmaker and writer, says his work is a reflection of his legacy, a reference to the famine research conducted by his late father, agricultural economist NS Jodha, and referenced in books by economists such as Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze.
“It’s heart-breaking, taking such photos,” he says. “It’s infuriating. Equally infuriating are some of our farm policies that bypass these people. And still, they’re desperate to tell their stories, travelling from the furthest corners of India to protest near Parliament.”
At protest sites, people tend to be more willing to talk, engage, discuss their losses and their despair. “What’s relatively more difficult is visiting families in their villages. They’re confused about why I would travel, stay in a hotel, hire a car… all to document their stories,” Jodha says.
Often, one member of a family won’t acknowledge that their loved one died by suicide. Those conversations are the hardest. “One young man in Tamil Nadu said his parents died of heart attack, both on the same day. A widow pinned her 30-something husband’s passing on a heart attack too.”
His hope is his stark portraits help put a face to the abstract and distant idea of the climate crisis. Storytelling is his purpose, his dharma, he adds. “Not dharma as it is popularly understood, linked to a religion, but dharma as a sacred duty around a profession. A doctor’s duty is to heal; a teacher’s to impart knowledge. For a photographer, documenting our world is dharma.”
Jodha’s next projects will manifest that dharma too: A graphic novel “on all kinds of censorships… that of the marketplace, of the government, of the mob”, and an art project on mob violence, expanded to include voices of saviours. “I believe, in India, if you get past the verbal flourish, be it of politicians or op-eds, it’s the decency of ordinary folks that has saved us,” Jodha says.
Often, a relative won’t acknowledge their loved one died by suicide. Those conversations are the hardest to have.