Asha's experiments with the camera
Noted street/food photographer Asha Revamma recalls her interesting encounters with subjects.
It was a shop in Khan el-Khalili, a famous marketplace in Cairo, Egypt. Asha Revamma had gone there with her Canon 400D. She was speaking to the few who knew English at the shop, taking photos of the place when two men walked in. They asked her to take their photo. They seemed very friendly, and Asha began clicking. But then a third man came running to the shop with a stick and started beating up the two guys. Once he chased them away from the shop, the angry man turned to Asha and started scolding her. She didn’t follow the language, but found that the men at the shop were defending her, settling an issue she couldn’t understand. Asha learnt later he was suspicious of foreigners, believing they might be spies or else portraying the people in Egypt in a poor light.
Dejected and feeling very down, Asha left the shop that day and walked through the streets when she passed a man with a hookah. The photographer in her woke up, and she went back to the man with the hookah, asking his permission to take a photo. It brought back a positive energy that Asha always found when she was with her camera. Today she has established herself, her images often picked up by Getty — of street and food photography. A soft spoken woman now living in Hyderabad, Asha’s story begins in Alappuzha where she was born and where she grew up before marriage took her away.
“It is a blog that brought me to photography,” Asha says in her soft voice, laughing easily as she spoke. Back then it was a point-and-shoot camera, the first digital camera she bought when she found cranes gathering in the compound outside her home in Hyderabad. “Migratory birds, who’d come build their nests and go away… I’d click their photos and photos of flowers and butterflies… Gradually it became photos of indoors,” she says.
She taught herself. The comments on her blog helped. She also joined a group on Flickr.com. “And on weekends a group of photographers would go to some place and take photos. I joined them when I initially found going out by myself difficult. But later I found that is good too, to go alone.” Her photography changed when she bought a macro lens and began capturing details. She’d put the camera in the balcony and near the windows, use the natural light to click. Finding more possibilities, she switched to food photography. About two years ago, she took a workshop on street photography led by Swapnil Jedhe, Swarat Ghosh, Vinod Babu who became her mentors.
Asha’s street photography of Hyderabad has a lot of pictures of women in purdah, some of them coming with beautiful stories. “Once I was visiting Golkonda to show the place around to a friend who was visiting. We saw these two women in purdah who suddenly started twirling together. I went and asked if I could take their photo. They said yes, but didn’t seem to bother about the camera. They kept twirling happily, not minding the camera, not asking me if they could see what I clicked. That was a wonderful moment,” Asha says.
Beautiful moments could sometimes turn scary too. In her stint in Egypt — that was two years long — Asha used to do voluntary work as a photographer for an NGO, Fair Trade Egypt. Once while going there, by the banks of the Nile, and below a bridge, she found a boy fishing and began clicking his photos. Engrossed in her work, and moving back a little to get his shadow too, Asha didn’t notice an army man come next to her. “It was the time of the military coup. Luckily he didn’t question me and I quietly put my camera inside and walked away.”
Back in India, it has been less eventful. And surprisingly, Asha has very few pictures of her homeland, in Kerala. “I don’t stay a lot in Kerala, perhaps that’s why,” says the talented woman who has got a scholarship at the Indian Photography Festival in Hyderabad last year.