Town Boy: In Conversation with Sathish Kumar

Sathish Kumar’s analogue camera is his constant companion and together they picture the natural and peculiar unfolding of his everyday life. The resulting photo series, Town Boy, has thus been shot over a span of fifteen years. He began chronicling as a teenager and the series witnesses his move from his home in Kanchipuram—an ancient town famous for its temples and silk—to the densely-packed, fast-moving metropolitan city of Chennai. The grainy film photographs hold within them a coming-of-age narrative, as the artist / protagonist often returns to his hometown for a sense of rootedness as well as for respite and clarity. The slow and deliberate process of analogue image-making, the massive corpus of images and the dust spots on them resonate with the constantly transforming sense of time as the artist negotiates between stages of modernity and development in the two urban spaces.

An uncle who started a commercial photo studio in Bengaluru in 1997 was responsible for Kumar’s initial introduction to the world of light, chemicals and prints in the darkroom, giving him his first point-and-shoot camera. Kumar's editorial process also places emphasis on the material and affective perspective from which he chronicles, as friends and family not only feature in his images but they also help him think through them.

Sathish Kumar is the winner of the Serendipity Arles Grant and in the following conversation with the artist, he speaks about Town Boy as it has been imagined and curated in the form of an exhibition at Les Rencontres d'Arles 2022.

Recorded on 6 July 2022.

All images courtesy of the artist.

To read more about Rencontres d’Arles, please click here, here and here.