Visions of woman
Kerala-born photographer Keerthana Kunnath turns her lens onto womanhood, in unexpected forms.
Words Divya Venkataraman
Photography Keerthana Kunnath
When photographer Keerthana Kunnath stumbled across a community of Indian women bodybuilders on social media, she didn’t expect that they would end up becoming her friends. She reached out to shoot them — they would become the key subjects of an ongoing series called Not What You Saw,which won the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition Award in 2024 — but they also evolved into something more. “They’ve come over so many times now,” she says, speaking of her ancestral home in Kerala, the southern state of India that she grew up in. “My father knows them at this point, they chill with him even when I’m not around.”
For Kunnath, who now lives in London, knowing and understanding her subject is the key to her work — and her ambition of using photography to subvert the way women are conventionally configured in society. “From the time I started photographing women, it was about disrupting something,” she says. “I grew up watching Indian cinema. There are so many South Indian movies where women are being cat-called. Women are giggling. I was like, no I am not going to giggle. I’m not going to fall for a guy that’s bullying me. That kind of representation didn’t feel right to me.”
Now, Kunnath’s work runs the gamut, from commercial shoots for brands like Nike and Apple, to fashion editorials on dunes or far-flung beaches, to celebrity covers like Alia Bhatt for Harper’s Bazaar India, and Hanumankind for Perfect Magazine. And of course, there are the personal projects, embarked upon to capture some nugget of truth, some expression of feeling, through her lens. Whichever the format, Kunnath takes a pointed approach: to uncover something real about her subjects.
“Everytime I photograph a woman, I want to know about them, about their stories, their experiences, whether we share ideas, whether we have felt the same things.”
“It helps me to get an honest portrayal. It breaks down the walls. It helps everyone feel comfortable.”
“Everytime I photograph a woman, I want to know about them, about their stories, their experiences, whether we share ideas, whether we have felt the same things.”
“There was a festival going on a few kilometres from my hometown, and I saw these girls dressed so beautifully. There’s a certain charm that people give off when they’re all dressed up, when they feel pretty.”
“This was taken in a village outside Jaipur. These women made these rugs.”
“I took this in Chennai, India right after I had just lost my grandmother. I was thinking a lot about her, her memories, and things she’d told me. I shared that with [the model] and she was close to her grandmother too, so we bonded over that.”
“This is my grandmother, about a month before she passed. My father is giving her a haircut. By this stage, my father was taking care of her in every way, bathing her, dressing her, feeding her, everything. I saw the real pureness of their relationship.”
“It helps me to get an honest portrayal. It breaks down the walls. It helps everyone feel comfortable.”
See more of Keerthana's work here
