Perpetual Stills

Punaloor Rajan’s black and white photographs form an engaging biography of Kerala’s cultural and political landscape as seen through the eyes of an avid chronicler. From 1956, when the state of Kerala was constituted, to the late 1980s when he withdrew from photography, Rajan documented Kerala’s major public figures from close quarters. Among his subjects are legendary Malayalam writers Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, S K Pottekkat, Thakazhi Sivasankarapillai, M T Vasudevan Nair, Kamala Surayya; and communist stalwarts like P C Joshi, K C George, M N Govindan Nair, E M S Namboodiripad and C Achutha Menon among others.

Rajan was a member of the Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC), a legendary left cultural organisation formed in Kerala in 1950. As part of KPAC’s plans to start its own film unit, he was sent for training in photography and cinematography to the All-Union Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where alumni and teachers included figures such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Eisenstein. When he returned from Moscow, Rajan brought home a 16mm Bolex Paillard camera with which he documented several of his subjects, especially Vaikom Muhammad Basheer with whom he shared a close friendship, on black and white film. His personal quest resulted in what now constitutes a rare and unparalleled archive of photographs and video footage. Selections from this oeuvre put together in collaboration with writer and journalist Mangad Ratnakaran and painter and photographer Pradeep Chandrakumar, both of whom have been working to archive and preserve Rajan’s work, form Perpetual Stills (2014), an installation of photographs that is presented at the Biennale.