Shiju Basheer doesn't plan it but somehow his photographs will arrange themselves into a theme. He takes his camera out for work but then comes across an image looking beautiful in its natural setting. Like the old-people series he had taken a little while ago and exhibited at Fort Kochi. Now, he recalls another series he had taken in his days travelling in Ethiopia — of women breastfeeding their babies, of mothers and children. At a time a magazine cover of a model posing by breastfeeding another's baby is discussed for its rights and wrongs, Shiju remembers these women who were the most innocent he had ever seen.
"They don't even know what country they live in," says Shiju who hails from Kayamkulam. It was at the Omo Valley, at the Kenyan border where Shiju had gone to for an ad shooting. "I met the people there, stayed at their houses, spent a couple of months, as one of them. The women knew me well and were comfortable with the photos I was taking," he says. "They don't think much. They don't know the shame of nakedness that people in the outside world are so conscious about. When they see their babies are hungry, they feed them, wherever they are -—the most natural thing to do. We don't know about such lives, such people living in one part of the world. It is these lives that I wanted to bring attention to through these photographs," Shiju adds.
A documentary photographer specialising in social and humanitarian issues, Shiju too had a take on the magazine controversy. 'Modelling alla mulayootal — Breastfeeding is not modelling' he wrote on his Facebook. He now works as a freelance photojournalist based in Dubai. Shiju is a self-trained photographer, starting his career on an online news portal. He has travelled through several parts of India and other countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Nepal. He has also spent time in Europe and Africa.
