In 1942, the young son of the owner of a musical instruments shop in Alappuzha, invented a camera that revolutionised studio and field photography in India.

The Vageeswari camera as K Karunakaran named his affordable teakwood camera was responsible for the rise of photography, especially in southern India, as no longer did studios have to wait for cameras to be shipped from foreign shores. The first camera he sold was priced at ₹250.

At the spectacular Lokame Tharavadu (the world is one family) art event currently going on in Alapuzzha, presented by the Kochi Biennale Foundation, an antique Vageeswari camera catches the eye. Alongside it are some stunning artistic landscapes of the seaside town that have been shot using this ancient camera. The Vageeswari exhibit is the brainchild of Anu John David, a 38 year-old-photographer and designer from Kollam, who got enchanted by the story of this camera ever since he heard about it eight years ago.

When Lokame Tharavadu’s curator artist Bose Krishnamachari invited him to participate in the art show, David says: “I felt I should produce a body of work relating to Alapuzzha’s history and landscape using the Vageeswari camera.”

He passionately describes how Kuttanad, the region in which Alapuzzha falls, was initially under the sea and the land was formed from flood deposits of rivers, though local legend is that this was forest land destroyed by a wild fire. His images explore these as well as the intriguing Buddhist connection of this seaside town, which has a rich Portuguese, Dutch and British history.

First challenge

The first challenge for David was to lay his hands on a working model of the camera. Those who had it were antique collectors and were not ready to part with it. Some studio owners had it, but were charging a high sum. The second challenge was to work with film slides and he had only two of those. Only four images per outing were possible, after which he had to develop the film and reload them – a time-consuming process.

‘Dark room on the go’

“I faced light leakage from the film slides and had to fix it. Since I was travelling to capture images, I had to set up a dark room on the go, mostly in wash rooms,” says David.

Finally, he had 35 working images and he painstakingly handpainted colour onto the black and white negatives to create truly evocative images of this heritage town.

Interestingly, in Gurugram, where visual historian Aditya Arya has set up the unique Museo Camera (a photography museum), there are quite a number of Vageeswari cameras. “I believe it is the most iconic camera made in India,” says Arya, describing the story of how it was made. A studio based in Alapuzzha had approached Karunakaran’s father, a part-time musician, to repair the bellows of his foreign-made field camera. He refused, but young Karunakaran took up the challenge.

He ended up making his own field camera, with every part except the lens made by him. In 1945, he set up a shop at Mullackai in Alappuzha and started manufacturing the cameras.

But why is it called the Vageeswari camera? David who spoke to Karunakaran’s son for his project conjectures that since the family played the veena, they named it after their favourite deity Saraswati.