Anup Mathew
Thomas

Since 2006, the subjects of Anup Mathew Thomas’ images have originated from the lived experience of people from the Indian state of Kerala. They recount events he has studied over several years and stories told to him by people he knows or has met during his research. These events and stories are represented through images of sites in which they occurred, or to which they have a relationship. His images remind us of what it means to be human ⎯ the fragility of life, anxieties of power ⎯ and their influence on families and communities.

For the work Nurses (2014), Thomas traced forty-eight Keralan women working as nurses in seventeen countries around the world. Nurses from the state are highly educated and have increased prospects for emigration. The portraits, which feature the nurses standing against the natural landscapes of these countries, convey both a sense of location and dislocation. In the series Scene from a wake (2016), we see how a sense of self, social consciousness and the vernacular are shaped by global influence, such as an image of a rosewood sculpture of the Madonna by Indian artist Jyoti Sahi from the 1970s. Sahi’s modelling of the sculpture on fisherfolk from the Keralan coastal town of Marianad ⎯ as explained in a text by Thomas ⎯ was criticised by the congregation of the Society of the Catholic Apostolate in Kerala (for whom it was made) as being “too dark and ‘ugly” to accurately represent the mother of Jesus Christ.

Humanity in Thomas’ images is not expressed as a universal idea. It is an individual state of being and awareness shaped by surrounding material and social conditions. By highlighting this dynamic, he enables viewers to empathise with his subjects. Several works testify the importance of contingency ⎯ overlooked in research-driven photography ⎯ by capturing moments of chance within long-term phenomena. As a result, “place … ”, to quote the jury of the Han Nefkens Foundation⎯BACC Award for Contemporary Art (which Thomas won in 2015), “ … becomes a natural background rather than a geographical ‘other’”.

Embedded in these approaches is Thomas’ critical reflection on image-making. In Hereinafter (2012), the paradox of the camera ⎯ which highlights as much the absence as presence of its subject ⎯ is reflected in images of the ‘life’ surrounding death and funerary rites in Kerala. The texts that Thomas writes to accompany his images raise questions on the relationship between image and text. Layered with ambiguity, they are not so much descriptions as extrapolations that highlight contexts and phenomena related to the subjects of his images. The veracity of text as a vehicle of narrative truth is brought into question by the physical and contextual gaps between his images and texts (he has previously presented his texts as framed works, for example). Thomas is unusual among contemporary photographers in the care that he takes to explain the intention behind his works to the people he photographs, seeing their involvement as key to the integrity of his images.

Text: Melanie Pocock