New Delhi, Sep 28 (IANS): Homosexuality, uranium mines, prostitution, childhood, the space one shares with a domestic help -- the ongoing Delhi Photo Festival depicts all these and more.
An initiative of the India Habitat Centre(IHC) and Nazar Foundation, the photographic collections come from across the world at this biennial event.
Around 90 countries are participating in the festival this year. The event began Friday at the IHC and several art galleries in the city and will continue until Oct 11.
Vietnam-based photographer Maika Elan has a collection that depicts homosexuality titled "The Pink Choice". The touch and synchronised rhythm of the couples shows affection as they are seen engaging in the ordinary routines of everyday life -- watching television, smoking cigarettes, taking a rest after a day's work or just flirting near a river.
Jannatul Mawa, a Bangladesh-based photographer, through her collection "Close Distance", brings together the homemaker and the maid of a household. The two sit together on a couch and it is interesting to see the comfort and yet the coldness, the aloofness despite the closeness.
Telling us about the life of a 23-year-prostitute, Leila, and her two children in Italy is photographer Myriam Miloni through her series "Important Things Are Said Softly". The notion of a family is traced again through the story of a mother and her two children who live together, play and fight.
Chinky Shukla's grim, black-and-white photographs of the people of Jadugoda in Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, a small township of the Uranium Corporation of India, throws into sharp relief the problems of living near uranium mines.
"Jadugoda: The Nuclear Graveyard" traces the deformities that children here are born with. A mother mourns her five-year-old and photographs of children with mental health challenges leave the viewer saddened.
From Uganda, that landlocked East African country, comes "Future Plan" in which photographers Alvaro Laiz and David Rengal collaborate with various NGOs to reach out to children who have grown up in refugee camps and have now reached adulthood.
These are young people deprived of the joys of childhood because of the exploits of the Joseph Kony-led Lord Resistance Army. Children were kidnapped to man the resistance movement which aimed at establishing a theocratic state. Besides kidnapping children and forcing girls into sexual slavery, the movement is accused of murder, abduction and mutilation.
The pictures depict youth whose childhood was lost to fundamentalism. And in their eyes, one can read the question: "What does the future hold?"