This is my first physical photo book. And it isn’t from Mumbai.
It comes from a narrow stretch of water that appears in the news every now and then - the Palk Strait, between India and Sri Lanka. The book is A5 size, small, 40 pages, A4 folded in half. Something you can sit with. The matte paper slows you down a little. It asks to be held, not just seen.
The photographs are from 2011. A time when bullets moved across this sea like something natural, like flying fish, along a border that doesn’t exist, and yet does. I had travelled there with Rohini Mohan, who was reporting on the lives caught in that invisible line.
Rohini would later write an award-winning book - The Seasons of Trouble - Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War (2014), tracing lives through the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war with a kind of care that stays with you. After reading my photo book, she wrote this on Instagram:
“@mumbaipaused has a grand photo book out, with his all-seeing camera capturing fishermen and women, and fish workers in Rameshwaram, Tamil Nadu, who take seabed-scooping trawlers illegally into Sri Lankan waters because the Indian sea has been overfished to nothing. The Sri Lankan navy used to shoot them. They live with the scars, but cross the invisible border in the sea again and again—for livelihood, to repay loans—fearing the sureness of poverty more than the possibility of bullets.”
Making a printed book, something that feels like a 19th-century activity for someone more at home on the World Wide Web, is a strange undertaking.
But my friend Ritesh Uttamchandani, who believes in print and self-publishing, kept insisting that photographs should exist in the world, not just on an increasingly unreliable web that big tech has slowly broken. (his photobooks here)
So, nudged by him, I designed the book and made a few copies following his footsteps. Just to see what it feels like when something becomes an object.
It felt worth it.
If you’d like a copy, write to gopalms@gmail.com or message/WhatsApp +91-9619759995. ₹700, including postage anywhere in India.
That’s all, folks!
I’m so glad there are people out there who still care about independent physical media! This looks great. Are you able to ship a copy to the US?
So proud of you Gopal, many congratulations.