Arati Kumar-Rao: Capturing Our Ever-Changing Climate
The damage that we as human beings have done to our environment is an issue that can no longer be overlooked. On Sept. 23rd, our city was host to the UNEP 2015 International Conference on Sustainable Development, where participants (including important figures such as Jan Eliasson, UN Deputy Secretary-General) sought “to identify and share practical, evidence-based solutions that can support the Sustainable Development Goals.”
As ecological concerns continue to push their way into the forefront of our every day lives as well as our political climate, environmental photojournalism will soon be one of the most important ways of telling this story.
Arati Kumar-Rao is a front-runner in this field, already reaching over 48,000 followers on Instagram in her first four years of professional photography and creating beautiful short and long-form pieces such as ‘The Thar Desert’ and ‘The Nowhere People’. Arati’s work is inspiring for a number of reasons: her ability to combine the physical with the human; her skill in capturing movement; her strength as a female photojournalist in a stereotypically male field and her unwavering dedication to illustrate the beauty and fragility of our struggling environment.
Environmental journalism is a calling Arati can trace back to her youth: “When I was a teenager I used to pore over National Geographic Magazines, dreaming some day of telling stories with images and words,” she says. “I grew up in Bombay (Mumbai, now). If I had to look back on my 20 years there I’d say the city taught me a lot about life and the milieu people live in.” Plus, Arati’s parents acted as a driving force behind her environmental interests: “We’d all go bird watching on Sundays, trekking into forests around Bombay on long weekends. Those trips obviously seeped into my psyche and stayed with me.”
Although her career began thanks to her past, Arati currently has her eyes fixed firmly on the future: “From where I stand right now, I see two major issues: a dangerous apathy towards the rights of people who are losing traditional livelihoods and have no safety nets; and a vanishing land ethic. Our governments seem to be only about backing big business and engineering solutions to some very important issues of our time.” Arati hopes that her work will have a tangible impact in the years to come: “The environment, the natural world, is what we all live in. We must ask ourselves how anthropogenic alterations to landscapes affect those living closest to them. By documenting these changes and its effects over time, I hope there some small way in which I can connect the dots and, maybe, effect change in policy.”
While striving to save the world one photo at a time, Arati still has the elements of everyday life to attend to: “I am a woman and a mother. I do have to juggle a lot of things.” In a field most often associated with men, photojournalism can be a tricky profession to navigate: “I do have to tread a little more carefully than my male friends in this line of work. But I do believe that the downsides are nothing in comparison to the perspective being a woman brings to seeing, feeling, and understanding issues. It is a voice that is underrepresented in our line of work, and needs to be heard a lot more.” And Arati’s interest in the female perspective has influenced her photography: “over the years (and maybe it is a function of the geographies I work in) I do feel that the story of women, their world, and how it gets affected by change is underreported. And I will be concentrating on that, going forward.”
Arati’s current project, ‘The Freshwater Trail’, will focus of the rivers, lakes, aquifers and wetlands of India, and will have a secret ingredient that she has discovered during her years in the industry. “When I started this project, I promised myself that I would give the places on thing: time. I want to take the time to let these places reveal things about themselves, and about me. I decided to refrain from reducing them to snapshots. I wanted to make space for trajectories that change over seasons, years, decades. As Rainer Maria Rilke said of art — and it is true of storytelling too, ‘In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing.’ So, in ‘The Freshwater Trail’ I plan to criss-cross the Indian sub-continent over time; watching, learning, waiting, documenting the state of our freshwater.”
