The Ground Beneath Their Feet

A photographer witnesses the transformation of a river island.

- Tanvi Mishra

A cliff towering over muddy waters, bearing a large crack, is photographed multiple times and the images are arranged in a composite grid. The water appears to be placid in the first few frames. At first glance, this sequence in Zishaan A Latif’s work seemed unnecessarily repetitive. As my eye moved from left to right, across the near-identical images in the first row, I found myself questioning the photographer’s intention. As I made my way forward in the sequence, this time from right to left, the images gradually began to reveal the incident that had been captured—the edge of the precipice started to bend, the crack began to widen and the water started to froth. The cliff was collapsing. Moving down the grid, the disfiguration became more and more evident, reaching a crescendo midway, as a large chunk of land fell into the water. By the time I reached the last frame, having moved in alternating directions in every row, the change was evident: a significant portion of the cliff had disappeared. The river carried signs of the disintegration, and I realised that Latif, and now I, had been witness to the landmass coming apart.

Latif’s first visit to Majuli, a river island in Assam, in 2015, was on an assignment for Asian Paints that involved documenting colours on the island to help develop a new palette. During his two days there, he felt that a “physical, social and cultural shift, which had been taking place for a long time, was palpable in the air.” But it was only on his next trip, two years later, and on six subsequent visits, that he was able to connect this to the island’s topography, which was being rapidly altered because of erosion. “The ghats continue to shift overnight, and on every subsequent trip I made following April 2017, I noticed a clear wearing away on the edges of the island,” he told me. “I have seen the ravenous Brahmaputra gobble away parts in a frenzy.”