THE ART OF DARKNESS
When photographer Poulomi Basu visited Naxal-affected areas, she found both beauty and violence
Aman fervidly beats a drum. A woman with a gun looks directly at the camera. A stream of flames illuminates a dark forest path. In Poulomi Basu’s photos from Naxal conflictregions, light and dark, war and domesticity meld in unexpected, haunting ways. These vignettes on the decades-long armed rebellion are collected in Centralia—shortlisted last year as one of four nominees for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. The winner of the £30,000 (Rs 30.8 lakh) award will be announced in September. The photos and a short film, Ghost Dance, are presently on display in London at the Photographers’ Gallery.
Basu, a trans-media artist, activist and photographer, describes her genre as “para fiction”—an interplay of real lives, dreamscapes and nature documenting a complex and multi-faceted conflict. “I felt this is a more powerful way to tell this story since truth is extremely contested in this area,” she says on the phone from London. “Whose truth is the ultimate truth? I decided to use all the perspectives and a collision between them to let audiences figure it out.”
Basu began visiting the Naxal-affected districts of central India in 2010 and photographed the landscape and people over eight years. The images have a raw, rich intimacy thrumming with many of the themes that animate Basu’s work: ecological ruin, women and violence. “All my work is contentious,” she says. “For me, it’s important that the lightness of something goes with the darkness because that’s what life is.”
“Centralia” is itself a reference to a Pennsylvania town, which native American groups gave up for a pittance to settlers in the 18th century. It later became a coal mining hotspot. Central and eastern India, with their rich mineral resources, have similarly been a battleground between the state, corporate interests and indigenous groups. “Politically, it’s a Maoist insurgency, but it’s also an environmental justice story,” says Basu. “It was important for me to put it in a global context.”
Centralia also has voices of female revolutionaries, activists and locals and uses family photos from abandoned studios which offer a striking contrast to the apocalyptic scenes of Basu’s narrative. “I decided I can’t be the moral arbiter of this story,” she says.
Basu has also worked as a photojournalist but was drawn to art and film. “I believe in long-form storytelling. You have time and space to do justice to your story, compared to being a photojournalist, where the life cycle of the piece is a week or day and then it is gone.” ■