Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
Photograph © Ronny Sen
What does the end of time look like?
Jharia was once a green forest. Coal was discovered here in the late 18th century and, by the beginning of the 19th century, most of India's mineral resource was mined here. As the imperial government, mercenaries, and princely families wrestled for control of distribution, Jharia withstood their greed, though eventually became successor to its own suffering.
A fire underground has been burning since, but its presence is now over ground - inside homes, temples and schools, in churches and mosques - places that were once thriving with life are now consumed by flames.
The end of time is manifested with shards and fragments; random, scattered elements of human existence, and a community without a future and plunderers of coal who move from site to site with blasting mines - survival in an apocalyptic landscape.
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At the time of our 1:1 Interview with Ronny, he was asked these questions about Fire Continuum.
PSA: What were your compulsions and concerns to start work in Jharia (your project Fire Continuum), given the fact that it had already been written about and photographed quite a bit?
RS: I was working as a fixer and translator for French filmmakers, Tiane Doan Na Champassak and Jean Dubrel, in the coal mines of Jharia. My job was to arrange everything on the ground, though later it was very kind of them to give me an assistant director credit on the film. I never thought of a project, in particular, and never carried my camera. I was just taking photos on the side with my phone camera. Only after a month or so did I start looking at the landscape and everything else in a more clinical and disciplined sort of way - thinking that maybe, I might have something here. What I saw was quite overwhelming. I had known about Jharia before, but to physically stand in the middle of a blasting mine, and right underneath you is the underground fire. It was quite a surreal experience. It was like being on the moon, and surrounded by people who have been exploited for more than a century. I ended up making a little more than 15 thousand images.
PSA: In your project, Fire Continuum, you are photographing the landscape using a vertical format as opposed to the horizontal traditionally used to photograph landscapes. Why?
RS: Mainly for two reasons:
1) Like everyone, I grew up looking at landscapes by the masters, mostly painters and photographers who have always looked at the landscape horizontally. I wanted to look at landscapes exactly in the opposite way - vertically. In fact, just after I finished working in Jharia I went for an artist residency in Poland, where I made only vertical images, in color.
2) In the digital age, where 99.9 percent of all the images we consume daily is vertical, on a phone, the whole world today seems like it is vertical. I shot everything in Jharia on a phone and vertical was what I was seeing all the time, and it always felt I was looking at something new.
20 November
