:The 10th edition of the Indian Photo Festival (IPF), inaugurated at the State Art Gallery here on Thursday, offers glimpses of a journey through time, memory, and culture. Governor Jishnu Dev Varma opened the festival, highlighting the historical significance of photography in India by pointing to an image of his great-great-grandfather, Maharaja Bir Chandra Manikya of Tripura. “One of the first cameras in India, in the late 1800s — one came to Hyderabad, another to Tripura,” he said.
“This is the first time these images are being displayed in Hyderabad.” Joining the Governor were tourism minister Jupally Krishna Rao, renowned National Geographic photographers Frans Lanting and Chris Rainier, curator and academic Sabina Gadihoke, and Amita Desai, director of Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad. Festival director Acquin Mathews stated, “We live in a world inundated with images — millions are uploaded every second.
This festival offers a platform to understand what good photography is and celebrate its potential to narrate stories across time and cultures.” The festival showcases a blend of photojournalism and experimental photography, bridging historical and contemporary narratives. Exhibitions include Shubhadeep Mukherjee's ‘Smells Like Home’, which uses mixed media to explore displacement and the lingering trauma of Partition, and Jaisingh Nageswaran's ‘The Land That is No More’, focusing on rural Tamil Nadu and its quiet stories of loss.
Krishna Rao invited vi.