World Photography Day was celebrated in a novel way by the Nilgiri Documentation Centre with a flash street exhibition at the Tibetan Market, opposite the Botanical Gardens to the delight of locals and visitors.
Dharmalingam Venugopal, Director of Nilgiri Documentation Centre, addressed a procession of members of the Ooty Studios, Photographers and Videographers Association and said that photography came to Ooty much before other places as it was the summer headquarters of the Madras Presidency. Pioneering British photographers like A.T.W. Penn, Willie Burke, Boesinger, Lavocah, and Sheppard had photo documented the Nilgiris since 1865, he added.
Stating that photo documentation of Nilgiris after Independence had become scarce, Mr. Venugopal appealed to the photographers and studio owners to preserve the old collections in their studios.
The street exhibition was a tribute to late Philo Irudhayanath, a primary school teacher of Chennai and a self-taught photographer and writer who was the first to photo document the tribes of south India since the 1950s.
The exhibition marked the birth centenary of Irudhayanath, who often travelled in his bicycle to remote areas of tribal settlements to document them.
Irudhayanath was a regular contributor to the The Hindu Sunday Magazine in the 1950s.
“Irudhayanath photographed in thousands the tribes, temples, people, places and anything of human interest during his lifetime”, said Mr. Venugopal and added that Nilgiri Documentation Centre is the repository of his works after his death in 1992.
The president of the Ooty Studios Association Altof and veteran photographer R.A. Das were honoured on the occasion. Earlier in the day, the procession was flagged off by District Revenue Officer Bhasker Pandian.
