The Better India · 10 hours ago

How a Photographer Is Helping North Chennai Children Become Visual Storytellers

In Chennai's Vyasarpadi - a neighbourhood long reduced to the label "rowdy area" - documentary photographer M Palanikumar has been handing cameras to young residents and asking them to show what outsiders never bother to look for. The photographs that emerged capture sanitation workers on tea breaks, grieving families, flood survivors, and the quiet textures of ordinary life that no headline has ever carried. "If people from a particular community tell the story," Palanikumar says, "the way they narrate their stories itself is a political statement." When the collective mounted its exhibition, they bypassed galleries entirely and hung hundreds of photographs along neighbourhood streets, outside the very homes where the stories lived. What the young photographers of Vyasarpadi are demonstrating is something older than photography: that dignity is not granted from the outside, but claimed from within.