Focus on rooftops where homebound lives played out

Walkers in Hyderabad’s KBR Park are being treated to an unusual spectacle right now — a unique photo exhibition organised by Indian Photo Festival 2020 (on till December 13), displaying a series of vignettes from everyday lives during the pandemic and lockdown. What sets these images apart is that they are all of ordinary people who have, if momentarily, escaped the lockdown to their rooftops and balconies. Consequently, the exhibition, entitled “Rooftop” (also available on India Photo Festival’s website) will seem familiar to everyone who has experienced the lockdown.

Madhu Gopal Rao, Hyderabad-based photographer who began this photo project in the early days of the pandemic that brought the entire country to a halt, says he didn’t have any preconceived thoughts or intentions about the project. “I’d hardly ever gone up to the terrace of my five-floor building till the lockdown was announced,” he says. “It simply began as a means to escape the confines of my four walls.”

When the photographer realised that it represented freedom for many of his neighbours too, he started photographing them going about their daily lives. Today, Rao has shot over 5,000 images, of which about 30 can be viewed on IPF’s website and 10 are on display at the exhibition venue.

Each frame is a surprisingly intimate glimpse of normal life, or more accurately, of people striving to maintain a sense of normalcy in these strange times. Therein lies the pull of Rao’s work: “When I photograph people who have been conducting so much of their daily lives on their rooftops, probably the only place where they feel slightly free and see the faces of people other than the ones they live with, I feel a sense of hope,” he says.

Indeed, his lens evokes a sense of community and normalcy instead of focusing on the undoubtedly dark side of the pandemic.

Readers will resonate with many images of everyday chores normally done indoors, which during the lockdown have been unselfconsciously performed outdoors.

In one frame, proud parents take pictures of their infant. Another captures a spirited game of badminton in which players have to sidestep sundry pipes and wires, all the while ensuring their shuttlecock doesn’t fly off the roof. In a third, a couple is engaged in an intimate conversation, seemingly unaware that they are in public gaze.

Photos: Madhu Gopal Rao

The pictures capture that altered sense of time that many have reported experiencing during the lockdown — a sense that time had slowed down, even as days have quickly blurred into weeks, and weeks into months. There is a discernible sense of waiting — whether it is in the body language of the subjects or in their activity.

The exhibition has received a good response, especially from the regular walkers in KBR Park. “This is the first time that I’ve had an outdoor exhibition and it’s wonderful,” Rao says. “It is a much more democratic format with people who normally would not visit galleries just walking in.”

The photography project is on-going and Rao still goes to his terrace every other day. “As the lockdown has eased, there are fewer people than before,” he observes. “But still many more than there used to be before the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Perhaps when the pandemic is truly behind us, he muses, people will once again return to their old ways and the rooftops will be empty again, save for the ubiquitous string of laundry. But the subjects of Rao’s photographs will attest the rooftop has definitely been a lifeline to cling to during this time.