The photo of a fisherman on a boat filled with the day’s catch, his lean legs speckled with silvery fish scales, will probably look familiar to you. So will that of a woman in a church, sobbing, her hands extended outwards as if in complete surrender to the divine. You may have seen these pictures on the Internet and in the papers. But it’s less likely that you know the man who shot them. Amirtharaj Stephen, the photographer, lets his photos do the talking. For four years, he was the eyes of the outside world at Koodankulam, where protests took place against a nuclear power plant that was built there. The 31-year-old recently won the San Francisco-based Catchlight’s Activist Award for his work.
Raised in the coastal town of Thoothukudi, Amirtharaj walked into Kudankulam with his camera in August 2011. Till then, Koodankulam to him was merely a place from where he bought fish. He gave up his job as a photographer with a lifestyle magazine in Bangalore to work on the issue that drew him during the time — nuclear energy. “I lived in a gated community of a heavy water plant in Thoothukudi where my father worked,” says Amirtharaj. He grew up feeding on the belief that nuclear energy was safe. “But the 2009 Kaiga nuclear power plant incident and the Fukushima nuclear disaster changed my perspective.”
Amirtharaj says that he wanted to “systematically document” the people’s protests at Kudankulam. “For the first six months, I couldn’t get any photographs,” he remembers. But he hung on, a silent spectator to the happenings at the pandal that housed the volunteers of the People’s Movement against Nuclear Energy and the everyday lives of the village of Idinthakarai.
Amirtharaj was witness to police atrocities; local practices such as payment of the ‘theripu’ or tax — ten per cent of the fishermen’s earnings were collected to support the protests; listened to conversations among intellectuals on world politics over lemon tea in tiny stalls; heard simple fishermen discuss a ‘complex subject’ such as nuclear energy. “Anybody in Tirunelveli can talk about it. This is a reflection of the mass movement,” he observes.
Along the way, he clicked images that he regularly supplied to the media. “I kept my photos as simple as I could,” he explains. Shot in black and white, it’s their brutal honesty that haunts the viewer. Many of his photos have been published in newspapers and magazines; two even in The Hindu. Amirtharaj says that he earned very little during the time. “I stopped buying clothes from 2011,” he smiles. “I borrowed a pair of jeans from a friend and kept my expenses to the bare minimum.”
It was Idinthakarai that hosted Amirtharaj’s first photo exhibition. “On January 1, 2013, I displayed my photos on the walls in the streets of the village.” He has also shown his works at street-side exhibitions in Rajasthan and at Puducherry as part of Pondy Art. These exhibitions take his works to the people, he feels.
“I’m still in Kudankulam,” says Amirtharaj. He is now documenting the livelihood of the villagers who participated in the protests. A woman from the village dubbed for a movie in a recording studio in Chennai; 21 of them travelled from Kashmir to Kanyakumari to campaign for their cause — Amirtharaj’s camera has documented them all. He hopes to bring out a book featuring his photos, with captions written by the people involved.
“A lot of people don’t have a voice,” he feels. His photos, he stresses, will not be that voice. They will plainly reflect society. He adds, “It’s the people who should interpret them.”
