A thousand words

These are some of the questions Nandini Valli Muthiah found herself asking as she watched a fancy dress competition at a Chennai school. The result of those musings and her attempts to capture the possible solutions on camera led to her collection of photographs,Remembering to Forget. The project is currently on view at the Sakshi Art Gallery in Colaba till February 15.

The impulse to capture the various underlying meanings of a plain old children’s event came to Muthiah in 2008 when she applied for,and received,a grant from the Tierney Foundation in the US,which supports emerging photographers. “You’re supposed to send a list of ideas regarding the project you’d like to use the grant for. The basic concept of Remembering to Forget wasn’t in that original list. This was an idea which I had attempted without much success about three or four years ago and I decided to give it one more shot.” There are no elaborate shots and angles here. There’s a standard painted background and the children are made to simply look directly at the camera. “That way,the children and their costumes engage the full attention of the viewer,” explains the 34-year-old photographer.

In some ways,the costumes seemed to reflect what the parents were dreaming for their children. Which is why,Swami Vivekananda and a prim school teacher found place next to mythological figures such as the goddess Lakshmi and Saraswati. But the attempt was also,Muthiah explains,to examine how some of the great people in our civilisational memory have been reduced to mere caricatures,only to be resurrected at the occasional fancy dress contest. Personalities like former president APJ Abdul Kalam and Mahatma Gandhi are hence represented with the iconic hairdo,and with the glasses,dhoti and walking stick,respectively. “We forget about them most of the time,but at a fancy dress,we dress a certain way in order to remember them,” she says.