Faces of children, people of the hills, and tired workers bore into your eyes beseechingly from an inner room of the Fine Arts College gallery. Dreamy visitors tread straight into their midst from the sunlit corridor of the famous Palayam junction that unites three religious places of worship in Thiruvananthapuram.
Leaving behind the birds and marchers photographed and placed on the outer hall, you find yourself face to face with that wall full of intricate faces. Black and white images of untold lives pull you into their days with their piercing eyes, and for a little while, into their reality. From photographs of a boy in Assam, losing his home in a forced eviction, to an ageing headload worker in Tiruchi, the gallery has turned itself into a billboard of struggling commoners, documented by a political activist with a penchant for life photography.
In Vijoo Krishnan’s bio, photography may find a very small mention, if any. He is a scholar of Agrarian Economy who chose to leave teaching and become a full time political activist, organising farmers' marches and raising farmers' issues across the country. In 2022, he became the youngest general secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha, the farmers’ front of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
But in his photo exhibition, titled “Of Land, Lives and Lores,” there are only a handful of farmer movements – a snapshot of raised red flags in the Nashik-Mumbai long march and a Martyrs' Day procession by women in Karivellur of Kannur, his hometown, among them.
Vijoo left Kannur when he was only four and grew up in Bengaluru, before he joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University and shifted base to Delhi. “I come to Kerala often,” he says, amid the proof of his visuals, the Chooralmala site of the Wayanad landslide standing tall behind him.
Visitors ask him about the lack of agrarian photos, the cause he most identifies with. But because he is inside the movement, he can’t really photograph it from the outside. Only rarely, when he gets a chance to look on from afar, does he make a few quick snapshots of workers’ movements. That is how the hill people of Uttarakhand formed a telling picture, when they spread out on the ground for the last state conference of the party in December 2024. “The Left is seen as restricted to a few pockets in the country, but yet, in Uttarakhand, covered in snow on every side and at a height of 3000 feet above sea level, we had a good mobilisation [that day]. I was on the stage to address the meeting and took this photo before my speech,” Vijoo says.
His people-photos are conspicuously detailed, the way portraits bring out the lines and pores and tell far deeper stories than posing subjects. “I could not ask them to pose, but these images could tell their story much better than words. When I took the photo of that boy [in Assam] from far away, bulldozers had run over his house overnight. Bengali Muslim farmers, who had documents to show their family lived here for more than a hundred years, were still forcefully evicted. It was the rainy season but their crops too were destroyed. In every face you find anxiety, in every person, pain. When we went with relief, it was only us, because when it comes to poor Muslim farmers, most other groups don’t bother. That’s how polarisation works,” Vijoo says.
The photo captions often describe the subjects as ‘victims’ — of forced evictions, of a cyclone, a dead Adivasi comrade called Leela who too was a victim of the system.
He was reminded of the film Gandhi, he says, watching the attack on crops, perhaps referring to the Champaran agitation (1917) when the British forced peasants to farm indigo without payment.
Vijoo often finds references in cultural adaptations — books and movies become part of his life in the lone journeys he takes for his work with the farmers. When he is not reading or writing on agrarian and political issues or Marxist literature, he indulges in the works of Eduardo Galeano, the famous chronicler of Latin America, or the books of American writer John Steinbeck.
Photography, a habit he picked up as a child after an uncle gifted him a Panasonic, also became an activity in his travels. Cameras have always accompanied him, in his JNU days when he visited the site of the Odisha supercyclone of 1999 or else the survivors of the 2002 Gujarat riots. He was elected president of the JNU Students Union while he stayed on the campus for 10 years, finishing his MPhil and PhD.
After four years of teaching at St Joseph’s in Bengaluru, Vijoo joined AIKS full time. His cameras went with him. He’d click on his phone from moving cars or trains. Village markets, birds in action, and even some of the faces that he has photographed in great detail were taken on his phone. His daughter Riya too is among them, her hair flying, caught in static electricity under her father’s gaze. He likes to take most of his pictures in black and white, they convey more, he says.
The photos help the movements that he is so much a part of. He reminds you of the Napalm photo that told the horrors of the Vietnam war more convincingly than anything else. He tells you the story of a prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp who smuggled out photos to carry evidence of the atrocities that transpired, referring once again to a movie about it (likely, The Photographer of Mauthausen). He says it was when the early photos of the Nashik-Mumbai long march went viral on the internet that many more joined. A journalist’s photo of the barefoot women in the march prompted many to come with footwear for them, Vijoo adds.
Photography can do much, and it must be with this hope that he travels with his exhibition. The Thiruvananthapuram exhibition is his fourth in Kerala, which began with a show in Kozhikode last year. It ends on January 22.