The wide-angle view

With squalor of the slums as her subject,Milan says she started looking at the unlivable conditions around her in a new perspective. “The filth has always been there. But it was only when I started capturing them with my camera day in and day out and coming face to face with the resultant diseases that I started questioning the pitiable living conditions and started propagating the need for change.”

Milan is part of an eager group of 13 youngsters from the slums of Dharavi and Ghatkopar who were given a chance to explore their neighbourhood from behind the lens for three months. The project was put together by a diverse group of NGOs such as Point of View (media,arts and culture NGO),Sneha (health,women and children NGO) and the Photography Promotion Trust that trained the group in the art of photography through intensive workshops and field trips.

The outcome of their endeavour has been markedly different from the scores of romanticised slum photographs regularly churned out by shutterbugs and tourists. With a ringside view of their own community,the candid canvas put together by the group presents the story of bustling enterprises such as Kubharwada and the women-run papad business that co-exist with the stark,squalid grind of life in the slums.

As many as 92 of the best photographs were handpicked and displayed at the recently held exhibition at Dharavi. “The entire exercise was meant to look at photography as a form of self expression beside being the art that it is,” said Khoshnam Hamid of Point of View. The NGO had earlier conducted similar sessions with women who were victims of domestic violence.

“It’s a huge confidence-booster. More importantly,as the photographers blend in very easily with the subject that is their own community they end up getting some of the best candid shots ever,” she says.

Rohit Patarne (18),a Class X student and one of the many participants of the project,has already embraced photography as a way of life. During the course of the project,Patarne was down with jaundice. Nonetheless,he was shutter-happy clicking pictures of everything he saw along the narrow gullies as he made his way to the dispensary for his daily dose of medicines. Rohit,whose father is a construction worker and mother a maid,is now planning to take up a part time job along with his higher studies so that he can buy a camera of his own to pursue his new-found passion.

“These days I don’t just look at something,I observe it with a photographer’s keen eye and mentally frame everything I see.”