DPOTY 2021 Open Category Commended

from RPS The Decisive Moment - Edition 24 - December 2021

by Documentary Group, Royal Photographic Society

Documentary Photographer of the Year

DPOTY 2021 Open Category Commended

Harikrishna Katragadda

'You Can’t Step Into The Same River Twice'

When pollutants are seeping our skins, bodies, landscapes, can photographs retain their distance and act only as a witness? This question propelled me to use the cyanotype process where contact between pollutants and the surface of the photograph is possible. I want to create narratives about communities and the environment by transforming images through physical interaction with site-specific materials found in and along the Ganges - one of the most sacred yet highly polluted rivers in India. This project aims to evoke the dependence of humans on nature, and the ways in which this relationship imprints the self and the inhabited landscape.

www.instagram.com/hari.katragadda

A Cyanotype portrait of a tannery worker in Jajmau made with photogram process using found chromium containing leather pieces. Chromium compounds are used to process leather in the tanneries, and Hexavalent chromium - which is known to be carcinogenic - is released as a by-product.
Harikrishna Katragadda

**Toxic foam from irrigation water released from the effluent treatment plant accumulates in an agricultural field in Motipur village, Kanpur.**
Harikrishna Katragadda

A bleached Cyanotype print of leather refuse-dumps containing chromium compounds. These dumps are a common sight in Jajmau, Kanpur. Hexavalent chromium, a by-product of the tanning process, is highly toxic and is known to cause skin diseases, lung cancer, liver failure and premature dementia.
Harikrishna Katragadda

A scavenger dives into the river for coins and pieces of molten gold and silver at Manikarnika ghat in Varanasi. More than 80,000 people take a dip in the Ganges everyday in Varanasi. Officials admit that the water quality of the river is most unfit for bathing purposes. Most of the Varanasi city’s untreated sewage and nearly 18,000 tonnes of wood used for cremation generates 700 tonnes of coal and ash every year, which finds its way into the river.

Workers process chromium saturated leather pieces to soften them inside a tannery in Jajmau, Kanpur. Kanpur is one of the most polluted cities in India and has been the hub for leather production since the British established tanneries in the 19th century. More than half of the tanneries in Kanpur are illegal and operate outside the pollution control regulations.
Harikrishna Katragadda

Stefano Sbrulli

'Donde los niños no sueñan'

Peru is one of the countries with the highest ratio of territory given up to extractive industries. More than 15% of the territory is in concession to mining companies, mostly foreign ones. For geological reasons the majority of those concessions are in the Andean area, over 3000 meters above sea level.

Cerro de Pasco has more than 70000 inhabitants and it grew around an enormous open pit called El Tajo. A crater two kilometers long and wide and almost one km deep. Over the years, El Tajo, has produced tons of copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver.

Despite the millions of dollars generated by over 400 years of mining exploitation, today Cerro de Pasco is one of the poorest cities in Peru. The health system is almost nonexistent, the education system is close to collapse and the population receives no help from the government.

The inhabitants of Cerro de Pasco live in a situation of social and economic exclusion without any possibility of escape and live in the shadow of El Tajo. Moreover, the pollution caused by 60 years of industrial extraction has made Cerro de Pasco one of the most polluted places on earth.

If international standards were applied, 100% of the population would be urgently hospitalized for the presence of heavy metals in their bodies. 33% of infant mortality is due to congenital malformations and the incidence of cancer is four times the national average.

www.stefanosbrulli.com

An illegal “recilator” makes her living by dividing plastic from the rest of the rubbish. Meanwhile she takes the opportunity to feed her pigs that she will sell in the market in Lima. In Cerro de Pasco, urban waste is managed by the mining company who deposit everything on top of an old mining waste deposit that was built on top of the spring of the Tingo river. The water is used by the inhabitants of the valley to irrigate their crops.
Stefano Sbrulli

**José Brian (9) shows clear symptoms of lead intoxication. The average concentration of lead in the hair of the children of Cerro de Pasco is 36 times higher than the average for European children.**
Stefano Sbrulli

A view on Chaupamarca neighbourhood and El Tajo. Mining began to intensify in the 20th century. The more El Tajo widened, the more the inhabited centre was dismantled and new houses were built in the outskirts of the city. What used to be a small mining village is now the capital of Pasco province. Today, there is almost no distance between the houses and the extraction site.
Stefano Sbrulli

**Yan (13) is affected by a behavioural disease, caused by the presence of lead in his body. This disease makes him violent and aggressive. Yan sits on a pipe from the old treatment plant.**
Stefano Sbrulli

**An overview of the neighbourhood of Paragsha in Cerro de Pasco.**
Stefano Sbrulli

Taniya Sarkar

'Nothing Left to Call Home'

‘Nothing Left to Call Home’ investigates how religious violence in my home state of West Bengal, India, is also patriarchal violence targeting women. This ongoing project seeks to memorialize under-reported traumas while honouring women’s resilience before a generation of memories is lost.

The 2020 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), known as “the anti-Muslim law,” sparked nationwide protests and communal riots between Hindus and Muslims in Delhi. As a freelancer, while covering the protest, I witnessed Hindu mobs attacking women and infants with acid bulbs, and also targeting journalists. Later, massive communal clashes broke out in my home state, West Bengal. Women, again, were targeted.

Sectarian violence is not new here; mass killings have erupted repeatedly since the partition of Bengal and Indian independence in 1947. But while the riots have become commonplace in Bengal, the media has overlooked the link between religious intolerance and patriarchy.

My project positions women’s voices, marginalized for so long, at the centre of this tragic story. Official narratives cast the violence as purely political, but women who have witnessed and survived these events reveal that these clashes are more complicated, arising at the intersection of politics, religion, and patriarchy. Women are often targeted, and always suffer.

Due to safety concerns, my method combines traditional documentary techniques with more exploratory approaches. I travel to riot-prone zones in both Muslimand Hindu-dominated areas. At each location, I make portraits and audio-record interviews with female survivors. Their stories inspire the constructed images, “visual metaphors”; moody, dreamlike images that capture the fear and the loss these women experience—and their resilience - without ever literally depicting violence. Finally, I want to publish this work as a multimedia installation, incorporating sounds with images, to reach the human rights communities.

taniyasarkarnet.wordpress.com