CHENNAI: When was the last time you went through old dusty albums stored in the dark corners of your shelf? When was the last time you took out those photos, felt the material of the print and maybe laughed or teared up a bit, recalling the day it was taken? If a picture speaks a thousand words, then those are stories that a personal photograph can tug at your heartstrings. And this was storyteller and actress Janaki Sabesh’s goal with ‘Photographic Memories: Open mic’, which she recently conducted in the city.
As I entered the small but well-lit room surrounded by warm and smiling faces, I couldn’t help but notice a small golden uruli (utensil) on the floor, right in the middle of the room. It had some photographs in them, turned upside down. Although the session began with a small introduction about each participant, it soon turned out to be a personal interaction session with people sharing their most favourite, memorable stories with the rest who were no longer strangers to them. Each photograph had an undying memory associated with it, some of them life changing, some revolutionary and some just simple happy memories.
Janaki began by narrating the story of an old photograph of her father and uncle sitting by their balcony, which now is just a brick. As she took the participants through her journey, not only did she relive her past, but she also took the other storytellers through her journey.
“It really changed my life,” said Soumya, a travel enthusiast as she picked up the photo that she had clicked while she went on her first solo trek, despite a lot of opposition. “We had planned it as a group, but soon everybody backed out. I was so frustrated, and so I decided to go alone. And that was the best decision of my life,” she smiles. Stories of close-knit friends sharing a glass of juice in their school days, the pain of losing a dear friend to being the only girl in a mechanical engineering classroom, soon
followed.
From black and white prints to colour photos and digital photographs, technology has indeed brought us a long way. Yes, you can delete unwanted digital photos with just the click of a button today, but the feel of physically holding a photo brings back so many memories and emotions. “It was a couple of weeks back when I was going through some old photographs that I realised how beautiful it was to do so. I don’t have to switch on or click on anything other than my memories, which kept coming back,” she recalls.