On a vivid colour wall, in 21 photographs of 9 x 6.75 inches, a fire is burning. As static as the photographs are, the sequentially changing shapes of the flames emerging out of the pitch-black ground gives mobility to the immobile. These photographs along with the 40 other photographs exhibited at Tarq, an art gallery in Colaba, narrates the tale of the infamous coal fires that have been burning in Jharia for more than hundred years. And the storyteller is the Kolkata-based photographer and filmmaker Ronny Sen.
Highway to hell
The Asian Age, 12 September 2018