Kerala has been in the spotlight after the BBC’s recent ‘The Real Marigold Hotel’ series set in Cochin in Kerala. Having returned from running my photography holiday there and then only days later seeing this amazing part of the world feature on the BBC it came as no surprise to see those who took part in the series love their experience there. As did the clients who came on the trip – Southern India has a particular magic to it. It’s a special place, and three visits in, I’ll go back again in a heartbeat.
Below are some of the photographs from the trip. Some are included to give you a sense of the place and others because I’m pleased to have shot them, especially the contrasty street photography images. As a genre street photography can be frustrating and scary – getting close requires one to be bold, shoot an awful lot, and be prepared to bin a lot of it. But that’s why spending two weeks practising the discipline, we all ended up bolder and proud of an edited selection of photographs.
Each of the four locations has a very different feel so by the end of the trip we all felt like we’d been away for a month not just a fortnight. We started in the Backwaters in a beautiful hotel right on the water’s edge and spent 3 days mainly floating around on a variety of boats watching local life, slowing down and soaking up the atmosphere as it unfolded in front of us. Then on up to the spice area of Periyar where we started to really focus on documentary street photography. A few days later we headed higher still to the cool green tea plantations around Munnar before dropping back to colonial Cochin.
Enjoy the photographs, and if you’re keen to come on the next trip in February 2019 do get in touch. Alternatively join me in Puglia, Italy 12th – 19th May 2018 – limited spaces available.
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- The view from our hotel garden. An overnight flight from London, early February…a pretty perfect spot to recover and spend a few days.
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- the hotel garden with its own little canal
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- the Backwaters
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- hand dredging
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- we took a public boat and the next images are taken from that as we made stops like a bus along the waterways
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- the boat boys who would jump on and off securing the boat at every jetty
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- A visit to a working coir factory
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- Alleppey town
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- Second location – Kumily. We turned our focus to street photography. I looked for strong directional light, strong colours and lots of contrast
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- Amazing what gets carried on a bike…
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- Just the four in this shot. There were bikes with more, sometimes a baby squashed in aswell
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- street food – making parathas
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- Third location – up around the cool tea plantations of Munnar
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- Tea pickers. Their voices carried across the valley, the sound of women gossiping as they worked. The same the world over!
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- A working tea factory where we could watch the tea process from drying to bagging
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- An afternoon spent exploring movement and playing with shutter speed. Coming of automatic, taking control of the camera and ‘making’ rather than ‘taking’ photographs
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- Final location – Cochin with its fishing and wholesale spice/rice markets
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- A set of images of traders and wholesale market workers
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- ..and of course a bike shot too
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- collecting for ‘toddy’ the local fermented drink
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- And to finish, a few images of the clients.
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- Our ex-headmistress superbly orchestrating a round of ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’.
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- quite possibly the friendliest part of the world I have ever been to.
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- Tutor hard at work reviewing images, kindly helped by Geoff her willing footstool assistant. Very obliging set of clients. (image copyright Jenny Stenhouse)
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- Taking photographs, having a chat, having a laugh with your subject – that’s one of the magical by-products of photography.
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- Building lunch – vegetarian thali on a banana leaf
