Ranni, Kerala
Our Story
Kannadickal Studio — since 1976
Kannadickal Studio opened in Ranni in 1976. K.K. George started it, and it is one of the oldest studios in the area. The same family has run it ever since — three generations of it now.
It is worth remembering what taking a photograph meant then.
Ranni, the nineteen-seventies
The room at the back
There were no screens. A camera held a roll of film, and that film was coated with a layer of chemicals that reacted to light. When the shutter opened, light fell on the film and left a mark there that nobody could see — not the photographer, not the customer, nobody — until the film was developed. A roll held twelve pictures, or twenty-four, or thirty-six. That was all you had. You could not check the back of the camera and take it again. You framed the picture, you judged the light by eye, and you pressed the shutter once.
Everything after that happened in the dark, at the back of our studio. We had our own darkroom, and every photograph we made passed through it. Nothing was sent away to a laboratory. The film was taken out of its canister in a room with no light in it at all — not a bulb, not a crack under the door, nothing — and wound by touch onto a spiral reel, then sealed into a tank. Then came the chemicals, in order, each for a measured number of minutes. The developer, which turned that invisible mark into a visible image. The stop bath, which halted it before it went too far. The fixer, which made the image permanent and safe to bring out into daylight. Then washing, then hanging the strip up to dry.
What came out was a negative — the world with its light and dark swapped, faces pale where they should be dark.
To make a photograph from it, the negative went into an enlarger, which shone light through it onto a sheet of photographic paper. That part could be done under a dim red bulb, because photographic paper does not react to red light. That is the red room people remember. The paper went into the developer tray, and for a few seconds there was nothing on it at all, and then the picture came up out of the white — slowly, all at once, faces first. That was the moment, and it happened here, hundreds of times a week, for years.
A wedding photographed on a Saturday might not be seen by the family for a week or more.
1983
The photostat machine
He brought a photostat machine to Ranni. It was the first we had seen anywhere nearby, and it was the size of a small room. Copying a document by machine was not an ordinary thing then. Most people had never seen it done and did not entirely believe it, and they came in crowds simply to watch.
He would stop his work and demonstrate the whole process for whoever had turned up, and then again for the next people who came. Schools began sending their students in groups to see it.
The schools and colleges
Through those years, most of the schools and colleges around Ranni had their photographs taken by our studio.
There are class photographs in houses across this district with our name on the back.
1985
A television outside the wedding hall
He bought video cameras, when there was almost nobody in the area who owned one, and began filming weddings.
He also carried televisions to the venues. Wedding halls here are small and the crowds are not, and most of the guests stood outside and saw nothing at all. He would set up a television outside the hall, wired to the camera inside, so that the people who could not get in could watch the ceremony while it was happening.
Forty years later, there is a word for that.
Other studios began hiring from us — the video cameras, and the generators too, because the power at a venue could not always be relied on.
The mixing unit
Then came the mixing unit, among the first we knew of in this part of the district.
Before a mixing unit, a wedding video was simply whatever the camera had recorded, in the order it happened, start to finish. A mixing unit was a console that let you take several tapes at once and combine them into one — cutting between angles, fading one shot into the next, laying music underneath, putting the couple’s names on the screen. It was the difference between a recording and a film.
The equipment cost enough that one unit served a wide area. For years afterwards, other studios and independent cameramen brought their tapes to our studio, because there was nowhere else nearby to edit them.
He taught the trade to a great many people in this area over the years, in this room. A number of them went on to work in photography themselves.
The work has changed almost completely since then. Film became digital. The photostat machine became an ordinary thing in every second shop. The wedding videos went to other people.
What has not changed is the reason people come here. They bring photographs that matter to them, and they leave them with us.