Framing the Tide

Women in fishing communities author vital stories of labour, crisis and resilience

- SUKRUTI ANAH STANELEY

WHO HOLDS THE CAMERA remains a powerful question in visual culture, especially when it unsettles longstanding 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.

Kumar, the founder of the People's Photographers Collective, said that their stories reminded him of his mother, who was also a fisherwoman. "Each day, after fishing, she would bring home vegetables, fruits and snacks for us, all carried in her fish basket, infused with the smell of the sea. I am filled with awe, standing here before so many photographs, unable to fully articulate the depth of emotion they evoke."