Devika Menon
Devika photographs interiors during monsoon — rooms holding their breath while the rain speaks. Her sequences read like short stories.
Devika Menon photographs interiors during the monsoon — the four months when Kerala's rooms become instruments that the rain plays. Verandas holding their breath. Courtyards that turn into wells of green light. The precise moment a household stops fighting the humidity and surrenders to it, hanging the good linen away and letting the season take the house.
She began as a documentary photographer covering the backwater rice harvests, until she noticed that her strongest frames were always the ones made indoors, looking out. Since then she has worked room by room across the towns of the Malabar coast, invited in by families who understand her project better than most editors do: that a monsoon interior is a portrait of everyone who lives there, whether or not they are in the frame.
Her sequences read like short stories — she structures them in chapters, with beginnings and weathered ends — and she is currently completing a book that follows a single house through all four monsoons of a leap-year cycle.
