When BS Shivaraju was a child in rural Karnataka, India, he and his mother would play at being police officers. It was one of many games encouraged by his grandfather, who had been a theatre actor. But despite the close bond Shivaraju had with his mother, Gowramma, they had no photographs together; they were unable to afford the fee at a local photo studio, let alone a camera. “Other people have albums to look back on, but I had everything in my head and my heart,” he says. Shivaraju longed to be an artist but, for financial reasons, he became a police officer in Bengaluru instead, staying in the job for 18 years.
His grandfather’s exhortations to be creative never left him, however, and so, in his spare time, Shivaraju started to take photographs. “Being a policeman, I knew how to respect and navigate common people’s lives,” he says. “And since childhood I had been interested in visualisation, in people, and in transforming into different characters.” Eventually, he quit the police and became known for his vibrant documentary photography (he recently received a visiting artist fellowship from Harvard). But there was still a project that lingered in his mind.
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Around 2017, Shivaraju – who now goes by the name Cop Shiva – began to write down everything he could remember doing with his mother as a child, laying the groundwork for an exhilarating ongoing series, No Longer A Memory. Using a studio that he built after returning to his home village of Bannikuppe, he furnished the sets himself with bright, hand-stitched backdrops, recreating those cherished childhood memories in joyful, maximalist splendour. And in the resulting funny and moving photographs, Gowramma shines through as his enthusiastic equal.
Cop Shiva finally has his own family album, which he’s exhibiting across India over the coming months. In turn, he gets to give his mother the spotlight he feels she deserves. “My mum, she is everything,” he says. “My teacher, my supporter, my father, my mother, my best friend. She’s an uneducated village woman, but you can see from each picture how she breaks the barriers.”
Cop Shiva’s No Longer A Memory will be at Art Mumbai, 13-16 November