Lenscape Kerala is an attempt at telling the state’s story through its landscape, rituals and people

Calling the exhibition as an initiative for travellers to come and enjoy panoramic landscapes and cultural diversity of Kerala, Riyas said this initiative will be made an annual feature of Kerala Tourism, with a separate group of photographers, including women and youth or even international practitioners to reinterpret Kerala each year.

The exhibition is an initiative for travellers to come and enjoy panoramic landscapes and cultural diversity of Kerala. (Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)

The Minister added, “Lenscape Kerala is a creative endeavour that showcases the range and scale of Kerala’s offerings for travellers of our time, who look for complete experience of places they visit.” The minister noted that the photographers were “left on their own, with total creative freedom, without any prying or external influence.”

Billa noted that Kerala is essentially a destination with lived experiences and what a photo exhibition like this essentially does is to bring before viewers across the nation the land’s many dimensions, making them pause, think and relate. Besides its renewed focus on Kerala, the exhibition also spotlights a wide range of sites and experiences that have largely remained unexplored, he said.

The exhibition is shaped by curator and art critic Uma Nair and with wildlife and conservation photographer Balan Madhavan as the Director of Photography. Madhavan recalled his initial scepticism when approached for the project. “I told them, ‘Are you crazy? What are you expecting in five days?’” he said, noting that even in four decades of photography, producing exhibition-ready work within such a short window is rare. Yet, working deliberately during dawn and dusk, the photographers captured what he described as “impossible to capture,” reflecting how tourism imagery has shifted from mere beauty to “the totality – architecture, culture, food, people.”

Sharing his experience of Wildlife photographer Umesh Gogna describes capturing “one of the rarest pictures” — a face-off between two endangered species The Great Hornbill and Nilgiri Langur noting that even Madhavan, after 40 years in the field, had never witnessed such a moment. For Gogna, colour and scale also become narrative tools, shaped by his background in Rajasthan and his instinctive pull towards palettes that define place.

The exhibition is an initiative for travellers to come and enjoy panoramic landscapes and cultural diversity of Kerala.
(Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)

Award-winning journalist and photographer Kounteya Sinha’s work resists the obvious. “I didn’t want to show a performer with a performance,” he said, speaking about the photograph of two Theyyam artistes playing with their nephew. Instead, his images dwell on inheritance and intimacy — a child changing into the ritual attire without being asked or told, because “it’s in his blood” to become a performer. His frames trace Kerala not as scenic beauty but as “the beating heart,” where faith, movement and humanity blur, and where a man’s transformation into a god remains unmistakably flesh and blood.

Mumbai-based visual artist and photographer Natasha Kartar Hemrajani’s section pulses with red, a colour she saw as unifying across Kerala’s religious and political diversity. “The strongest colour that came through for me was red,” she said, using layered exposures, flowers and blurred figures to speak about Marxism, community and coexistence without letting detail overpower emotion.

The other photographers whose works are at the exhibition include Aishwarya Sridhar, Amit Pasricha, H Satish, Manoj Arora, Saibal Sas, Saurabh Anand Chatterjee and Shivang Mehta.