The WASH photo project exhibition

The documentary photography fellowship is an opportunity to witness and capture how clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene practices have a positive impact on an individual’s life, and how the lack of it can lead to unimaginable circumstances.

A fully funded fellowship, it encourages amateur photographers from educational institutions to participate and document strong, innovative and diverse visual narratives.

Our panel of accomplished documentary photographers – Samar Singh Jodha, Paroma Mukherjee and Prashanth Vishwanathan mentored the selected fellows during the fellowship period.

With a cross-national coverage, the fellowship aims to explore visual stories on water across India. It culminated with a photography exhibition on World Water Day (22 March 2019) to give the selected fellows an opportunity to showcase their work.

The aim of the exhibition was to engage a wider audience in the global water crisis and use photography as a pathway to understand as well as start a conversation about the water crisis in the country and its solution. It drew on a wealth of stories from 10 states and 18 locations across the country demonstrating the scale of water crisis and the various interventions that are being adopted by rural and urban communities.

‘The WASH Photo Project’ aims to capture the various issues faced by urban and rural communities when it comes to accessing clean water like walking for miles and spending hours just to access a few buckets of water or the severe health implications of consuming unclean water.

The photographs were categorised under five key themes that emerged from the word WATER.