Life’s a climb

Visual journalist Jyothy Karat captures the thrill and beauty of rock climbing in her documentary photo series that follows climber Praveen C.M.

Multimedia producer and visual journalist Jyothy Karat had always been drawn towards adventure sports — being keenly interested in chronicling the evolution of extreme sports in India, and how these new activities are making an impact on ordinary lives resulting in extraordinary stories about human endeavours. That’s how she began her ambitious rock climbing documentary.

Origins of the climber’s project This idea occurred to me when I first met Praveen C M, one of the top-ranking climbers in India. He was preparing to climb the Everest, after having scaled a very dangerous peak called Mt Zambala in the Siachen Glacier. But nobody knew of this! I then realised that the climbing community in India lives under the rocks, so to speak! By default, climbers are attracted to inhospitable terrain and they endeavour to climb mountains which normal people don’t dream of conquering. For the past few months, I’ve been climbing and photographing Praveen’s work, bolting climbing routes and training rural climbers in Chitradurga and Badami.

First woman in the country to attempt this I don’t know any other photographer (man or woman) who is studying the lives of climbers in the country. But I personally think all such ‘first-woman’ claims are pointless. Like any other artist, I like applause too, but I’d prefer it to be based on the pioneering work I do, not based on my gender. I develop whatever skills I may require to do a particular story. To do an underwater story, I learnt scuba diving. I took surf lessons when I was documenting surfers. And now that I’m working on the Climbers’ Project, I trained myself for that.

Other notable memories Documenting underwater reefs on the east coast of India was extremely risky and the weather conditions used to be terrible — but then, it all paid off when I shot the bull sharks in the open sea (there were around 40 of them swimming around me) in Fiji last year! It was the scariest, most exciting and most beautiful experience of my life.

Countries shot at That’s a big list. There’s Bhutan, Maldives, Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Ireland and so on.