The anti-life

Every picture tells a story. Put them together and you have a novel, sometimes a life story of a culture, a group, a civilisation.

Death within birth is the thread that binds Johann Rousselot’s photographs

Every picture tells a story. Put them together and you have a novel, sometimes a life story of a culture, a group, a civilisation. Johann Rousselot chose to portray the death of one. It was the 2004 ‘

India Shining’ campaign that triggered it all for the photographer, who was moved by the two extremes that India was and sadly still is. The result — a contrast of India Shining, India Crying.

In 30 photographs Johann tells the story of the adivasis uprooted from the land they owned for generations, backed by law. But to make India a shining diamond, somebody had to go through the fire. It turned out to be the Vidharba cotton farmers. So you have eyes staring at you, looking for answers, poignant images of the agricultural crisis that move to tell the tale of their wiped out shanties and houses. People stand in emptiness and stare at the emptiness that awaits. Also in the photographs are the last images of those who chose to end their lives, and also those that they left behind, inconsolable, grieving and alone. Their destruction is the construction of a new India. Tall buildings stand where the history of a tall culture lays buried. “The instrument of progress is impatient and greedy,” asserts Johann. The greed is to fill the spaces by coffee joints, bowling alleys, bungalows. Faces of the new developing India beam and look up. After all, ignorance is bliss.

On at Alliance Francaise, Sector 36, till October 25.