Balaji Maheshwar
We as photographers don’t have to go behind powerful imagery, rather, we have to find ways to take a good image that could be used to generate power.
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Maruthar Gopalan Ramachandran (popularly known as MGR) was the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu between 1977 and 1987. But before his famous tenure as a politician began, MGR had already cemented himself in the Tamil imagination through decades of playing the hero-saviour in blockbuster Tamil films, a suite of movies still re-watched with veneration today. Half a century prior to the pervasive social media environment we inhabit today, that turns on an equivalence between image and self, figures like MGR consciously used their star status to convert a fan following into a voter base. In this conversation, Balaji Maheshwar and Karthik Subramanian, two photographers from Tamil Nadu who are both making work exploring MGR’s legacy, open up questions around image worship, image deities and devotees, and the role of cinema in shaping our most intimate memories.
- Keywords: image worship, Jayaram Jayalalitha, Maruthar Gopalan Ramachandran, MGR fan clubs, Tamil cinema
Balaji Maheshwar is a photographer from Chennai. He has been working on his long photography project Dear Cinema, exploring his family’s relationship with cinema and politics for the past three generations. He believes that his photographs are autobiographical in nature and it is in his relationship with the outside world that he is able to understand more about himself.
www.balajimaheshwar.in
Karthik Subramanian lives and works between the real and the imagined. As a child, Karthik travelled frequently from his life in the city to his grandparents in the village, learning to see the world as it moved through the window of a bus or a train. Several years later, when he travelled to photograph the place where the river Ganga joins the Bay of Bengal, the scenes of the shifting land in front of him mixed inseparably with the lingering memories of the landscape through the moving windows. At this slippery edge between water and land began Karthik’s preoccupation with still and moving images; memory and history; the end and the beginning.
www.karthiksubramanian.com
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