The first Madurai International Photography Festival kick-started on a grand note at the Madura College in Madurai on Friday.
As many as 200 participants, mostly college students from Madurai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Coimbatore and several other parts of Tamil Nadu, are taking part in the festival. The highlight of the festival is the exhibition of antique cameras belonging to R. Selvam of Aathavan Studio in Madurai. The mindboggling exhibition has a collection of nearly 50 cameras used in the 1930s showing the evolution of photography from films to digital medium and gives a glimpse of some archaic negatives.
The festival, which is open to the public, is jointly organised by the Visual Art Centre of Madura College and Kannadi, an organisation where practising documentary photographers from all over Tamil Nadu come together to propagate photography as an influential form of communication.
Besides, at least 130 archival photographs depicting war, history, travel stories, portraits, life, culture and society have been exhibited in a gallery. “The archival photographs of twelve persons have been exhibited and six of them are from foreign countries. We got their approval before exhibiting them here”, said R. Senthil Kumaran, one of the co-ordinators of the festival from Kannadi.
On Friday, the participants were explained the nuances of archival photography by experts from the field of photography. A multimedia presentation by Kannadi on the photographs that created an impact was also made.
On the next two days of the festival, seminars and discussions about advanced techniques on documentaries and photography will be conducted by acclaimed photographers, documentary filmmakers and contemporary photography specialists.
Cinematographer Chezian and film maker R. R. Srinivasan inaugurated the festival in the presence of N. Rathinakumar, Visual Art Centre, R.Murali, principal of the Madura College, Parasuram Ramamoorthi, Velvi Trust and R. Senthil Kumaran, Kannadi.
