Nine years of
chasing quieter light.

Every year for the past three years, I've made the trip to Kulasekharapatnam, a small coastal village near Thiruchendur, for ten of the loudest, most transformative nights on the Tamil festival calendar. Kulasai Dussehra unfolds at the 300-year-old Sri Mutharamman Temple, and it doesn't resemble any other Navaratri I've photographed. Instead of watching a goddess be worshipped from a distance, entire villages become her. Ordinary men and women fast for weeks beforehand, then paint their skin black, blue, red — whatever colour the deity demands — and walk toward the temple as Kali, as guardian spirits, as Mutharamman herself. The story behind it is older than most of the people telling it: a demon named Magisasuran once terrorised this coast, and a child born with divine power grew into a woman in just nine days to destroy him. On the tenth night, that myth stops being a myth — it becomes thousands of painted bodies, drums, fire pots, and skull garlands moving through smoke toward the sea. I keep going back with a camera because one visit was never going to be enough; the light changes, the crowd changes, the face under the paint changes, but the devotion never does. Some of these frames are from a beach at dusk with the tide coming in behind a many-armed figure. Others are close enough to feel the heat off a fire pot balanced on someone's bare palm. This is the closest thing I have to an ongoing body of work — not one festival, but the same ten nights returned to three times, each visit adding another layer. I'm nowhere near done with it.

A photograph isn't supposed to need permission to look unreal, but some of these do — the fog thickened until the trees turned to charcoal strokes, the snow fell until the horizon dissolved into a wash of blue. I didn't add any of it. I just learned, slowly, to stop waiting for clear weather and start shooting through it. These are the frames that stopped looking like documentation and started looking like something someone painted from memory, not from a lens.

There's a whole world living at ankle height that most of us walk past a thousand times without seeing — a jumping spider's eyes holding more colour than most sunsets, a dragonfly's wing built like stained glass, a flower's stamens curling like something reaching out on purpose. Getting close enough to see it properly takes patience most subjects don't ask for; a spider won't hold a pose, and a dew drop won't wait for you to find focus. I love this work precisely because it has nothing to do with travel or a destination — just a garden, a lens, and the willingness to get down low and stay there.