POLITICAL PRESENTATION IN INDIA

When India’s high-profile politicians head into town, its difficult to ignore their presence. Chidambaram was in Cuddalore to launch a student loans scheme intended to encourage poor families to send their children into further education. I’m entirely supportive of such initiatives but I’m certain I wasn’t the only one in Cuddalore last week who felt that the well-being of students was a rather secondary concern to those elected officials eager to exploit the situation for a bit of self-promotion.…

TAYLOR WESSING PORTRAIT PRIZE

I welcome the diversity of style of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and also the exciting prospect of seeing how differently individuals interpret the idea of a ‘portrait’. But I do wonder about the effect on the viewer’s ultimate understanding and interpretation of a photograph when it is hung beside so many unrelated images. When an environmental portrait that directly raises an important and urgent subject is denied context or placed alongside work that has no relevance to it, surely good caption information is more important than ever.…

TIGER POACHING IN INDIA

Instead of hanging out in the pleasant but rather staid company of the park officials who were organising the relocation, we began following Dharmendra Khandal, a maverick anti-poaching activist who heads a small NGO called Tiger Watch. Critical of the park authorities and as a consequence shunned by them, Khandal runs his own show chasing down the poachers and gun-makers who have recently wreaked such havok on the tiger populations of Ranthambore and Sariska.…