An image from Centralia by Poulomi Basu.
Indian photographer Poulomi Basu's book Centralia has been nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize. The foundation describes it as a complex body of work that "uncovers the violent, largely unreported, conflict between a marginalised community of indigenous people fighting under the People's Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) and the Indian state."
The PLGA, a banned organisation, is the armed wing of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
In Centralia, Poulomi Basu intentionally blurs the line between truth and fiction to explore the "unsteady relationship between reality and fiction and how our perceptions of reality and truth are manipulated."
"I don't really take pretty pictures," Ms Basu, who is based in the UK, was quoted as saying by CNN. "I mean, I'm sure they can be poetic. But ... I like in my work for the lightness to go with the darkness."
Poulomi Basu's family comes from West Bengal, the birthplace of the Naxalite movement. The idea of Centralia came to her when she found a box of her late father's documents and photos, detailing his arrest for sympathising with Naxalite insurgents.
For Centralia, Ms Basu spent 10 years visiting the conflict zones in central and eastern India. Her work focuses on three main groups involved in this hidden war: the military, the rebels and the tribal groups living in the area.
"Indigenous people, and the tribal groups in India are very marginalized communities," said Ms Basu. She also told CNN that many of the women guerillas she met had either witnessed or experienced sexual violence at the hands of security forces, which prompted them to join the fight. In one photo, two half-dressed women are seen running. Ms Basu explained that the picture was taken as a military truck approached.
Centralia, shot mostly in central India, uses a multitude of image types: cinematic double exposures of dark landscapes and staged portraits, juxtaposed with "shocking photographs of lethal crime scenes, testimonies and mugshots of fallen, often female, revolutionary fighters alongside images showing the traditional festivities of the rural communities."
This mix allowed Ms Basu to create a work of "docu-fiction" that questions the normalisation of violence and how conflicts are misreported in media.
Her work, she hopes, will help people understand that the insurgency is both an environmental struggle to preserve Indigenous people's connection with the land from which they have been displaced and a feminist uprising against sexual violence.
"I want people to understand that this struggle in feminism is still going on, and I want to understand that it is connected to environmental justice," Ms Basu said. "It's a war zone. I can't expect to change laws there overnight. But you can protest more, fight more."
Poulomi Basu is one of the four finalists for the Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize. Alejandro Cartagena, Cao Fei and Zineb Sedira have also been nominated for their works.
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