When there’s fish in the ocean, life in the port town of Ponnani starts buzzing. The tea shops brim with people and business thrives. In one of these shops, sipping tea and engaged in a crisp conversation is photographer K.R. Sunil, who is smitten with the place and its people.
By now, he is a regular at the tea shops. He can also be found wandering in busy street junctions, with his camera casually slung over his arm. On the rare days he cannot be seen, local townsfolk ask after him. “In case you happen to get lost in Ponnani, ask Sunil for directions,” the locals joke. For over two years, Sunil shuttled between his hometown Kodungallur and Ponnani, drawn by the sense of antiquity the town possesses.
Stories and storytellers
He says he has made a handful of close friends who don’t mind him occasionally pulling out his camera and clicking away. Not even Azeez, the pickpocket. One of the last among the generations of pickpockets of the town, he was a protégé of the Robin Hood of Ponnani, Kallan Kareem (thief Kareem), who was a darling of the people despite his vocation.
“I had seen him a couple of times and gradually we started talking. We became friends and once, during a casual meeting, Azeez took me to an abandoned house near the big mosque and began telling me his story… the years he spent in jail, his wife who left him and a life embittered by loneliness. When someone interrupted, he stopped. The next thing I heard about Azeez was that he was killed, allegedly stabbed by a friend. I never got to hear the rest of his story,” Sunil says.
Sunil’s photographic life has thus far been a journey in search of people. Their stories fascinate him more than the frames he creates. And the pictures are only mementos of the relationship with his subjects. “I get so engrossed in their experiences, their lives, that I don’t usually recall the moment I clicked the photo.”
His series on Ponnani was showcased at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) 2016. Titled ‘Vanishing Lifeworlds’, it chronicled in monochrome the life and ways of the town where religion, history and the sea mingle in curious ways. Beyond its cultural and historic significance as a port town, Ponnani is also one of the most important centres of pilgrimage for Muslims in Kerala. It has around 40 mosques, some nearly 500 years old. “The people I saw there give an impression of peaceful coexistence, which is very different from what religion has come to mean today.”
Sunil does not carry fancy equipment, not even a tripod. “I don’t want people to be conscious of me or my camera. I just want the honesty of the moment. I look into the person’s eyes through my camera, and I swear I can see a bit of their soul.”
Alikka, who had a small shop where he ironed clothes, was a friend. Once, when Sunil went to his shop as usual for a chit-chat, he found it shut. On enquiring, he learnt the ancient building housing the shop was to be demolished, so Alikka had to wind up and go home. Sunil recalls, “I have never seen someone so proud of his job. When I asked him why, he said, ‘How many of us have cops, government officials and such big guys waiting outside our shops? I do.’” Sunil went in search of him, finally finding him idling at home. “I will not forget the look on his face when he saw me.”
The portraits Sunil has taken, over the last 20 years, might appear to be a documentation of the unremarkableness of the human condition—whether it is of Bindu, who photographs corpses for the police department in Kodungallur for a living, or Hamsa, the fishmonger turned attar (perfume) seller in Ponnani, whospeaks through songs, or Aboobacker, the medicine man, who gives free medicines to the poor.
When photographing the bharani, a religious festival that transforms Kodungallur into a throbbing sea of red as oracles from the Bhagavathy temple march around wielding swords, it was angst that Sunil saw in the turmeric-stained faces of the devotees. The yearly festival draws pilgrims from all over Kerala: the oracles turn up dressed in red, with bells fastened to their feet and waists. They slash their foreheads and then smear turmeric on them.
“Every year, I went looking for Raman, the oracle whose eyes shone like embers, but never found him,” Sunil says. Then, in a small lodge in Palakkad, in a room smelling of holy ash, he finally found him. Raman’s eyes had lost their glow and looked distant and withdrawn. “The only time he smiled was when he pulled out a trunk from underneath his bed in which were kept photographs of his that I had taken years ago, cut out of newspapers.”
Stark frames
Sunil’s subjects defy traditional concepts of beauty and his frames are often stark, utterly devoid of embellishment. “It is not by design. I just happen to see these people who live on the margins, leading very ordinary lives and when I talk to them, I connect with their emotions.” After having studied sculpture at the Government College of Fine Arts, Thrissur, and won a Lalit Kala Akademi Award in 1997, Sunil turned to photography. Over the years, as he taught himself the craft, he stuck to the belief that emotion wins over technique.
In 2016, he won the India Habitat Centre’s grant for his collection of photographs on disappearing ponds. Sometimes, when he feels that portraits don’t speak enough about the subject, he writes about them for newspapers and magazines.
What does he plan to do with these stories? Sunil smiles. “I don’t know, I might write a book.” Presently working in Kochi on a show curated by artist Riyas Komu, one of the founders of KMB, Sunil is also working on a series based on transgender people. “As I said, I am with those society does not see.”