Visuals that capture essence of Chennai

In 2007, Chandrachoodan, a photography enthusiast from Chennai started a group called Chennai Photo Walk (CPW) with 12 people. They walked through different areas in the city, capturing beautiful images that everyone can relate to. Twelve years later, the group has evolved with around 16,700 members. To encourage amateur and passionate photographers, they have come up with an initiative called Eyes of Madras 3.0. This is a photography exhibition organised for three days, to exhibit the images clicked byvarious members of CPW under few curated themes.

“Chennai Photo Walk is ideation of a few passionate photographers, bound together by their passion for photography and love towards Madras. Over the years, CPW has grown into a family of over 16,700 members in its social media group. The sole objective of the group is to capture and document every bit of Chennai, through our lenses. As we all agree, every artist yearns for encouragement and appreciation. And we have to provide a platform where they can showcase their skills. That’s how we brought in the idea of Eyes of Madras. When we started 12 years ago, we didn’t expect that the group would become this huge and help people to bring out their innate photography skills. The group has passionate photographers across all ages and walks of life from school students to retired officers,” says GV Balasubramanian, one of the core members of CPW.

One would be awestruck after seeing 201 shades of singara Chennai through the perspective of 104 passionate photographers. The exhibition held at Art Houz, Nungambakkam, is based on eight themes — namakku soru dhan mukkiyam, textures. patterns.perspectives, crazy corner, expressions unlimited, corporate life, relationship & bonding, let’s go shopping and street stories of Chennai. “We have received over 1,200 submissions and out of these, 201 images (clicked by 104 participants) have been handpicked by an eminent panel of jury members,” says V Harihara Subramanian, a 72-year-old photographer.

CPW conducts monthly photo walks on the first and third Sundays in and around Chennai. In the last 12 years, they have organised over 200 walks. “Generally, around 30-100 people attend these walks and the images clicked are shared by members on our group’s social media pages. We have also started something interesting called ‘Walk for a cause’. For this, we have collaborated with NGOs and historians from the city. For our first photo walk for a cause, we have collaborated with a group called Nizhal, which is into the restoration of native trees. They took us around Ambattur Park where they taught us about the importance of native trees and why we should preserve it. We have also collaborated with historians like Ramakrishnan Venkatesh, Thirupurasundari Sevvel and so on,” tells chartered accountant Naveen Kumar, who is participating in the exhibition.