In 2010, one of his photographs was finally selected to appear in a regular feature called ‘Show and Tell’ in Timeout Bengaluru. Pradeep remembers that it wasn’t easy to get picked and said, “when I flipped through the freshly printed issue and saw my photograph running under that header, it was a massive milestone.”

From that point onwards, he grew as a photographer and started contributing images for lead articles that focused on various aspects of the city. 

“Bengaluru has been my most generous and most demanding subject. Some of my most formative experiences happened in the old pēṭe lanes. Wandering those streets after dusk, I stumbled upon the Garadi Manes in Ranasinghpete — traditional mud-wrestling houses tucked away in the city’s oldest quarters — and that became my first serious documentary project. Nobody I knew was documenting them. They were invisible to the city’s mainstream.  It was my first photo exhibition at 1 MG Road gallery with Clare Arni, the noted Bengaluru-based British photographer. Walking through Bengaluru’s canopy-lined streets and photographing its trees gave me a completely different relationship with the city’s colonial history. And the work on the toxic water bodies of Bengaluru was one of the most quietly devastating work I have experienced. You’re photographing what was once a thriving ecological system and is now essentially a dumping ground for chemicals, construction debris and other waste,” he said, reminiscing about some of the assignments.

Many of them like the one on tent cinema, garadi mane (a traditional gymnasium or wrestling training school) and huli vesha (literally tiger costume) tiger rituals took months of effort and he had to earn the trust of people and be one with them. For the feature on vanishing trades like dhobi, sweet vendor or rat poison seller, it was quite a challenge to even find them around the city. Then, he had to spend many weeks trying to convince them to be photographed.

What stands out is his preference to shoot at dusk or night. Walking through the dimly lit lanes, he learnt to find the right texture and mood in the glow and shadows of street lights. He feels that, “The characters you meet, the scenes that unfold in those hours, feel far more unguarded and truer than anything you find in the middle of a bright afternoon.” Many of his photos are shot in a small 10-minute window between 6:50 and 7 pm in the evening, when the sky has that magical blue light. 

After his stint with Timeout Bengaluru, instead of looking for another job with a media company, Pradeep decided to choose the freelance path. He said, “ It was a conscious decision to buy myself the creative freedom to earn a living while protecting the time and headspace needed to truly embed myself in the ground-level narratives I cared about most.” He is now involved in making documentary films on farming, food and working with many NGO and CSR projects. At Akshayakalpa Organic, he produced over 400 videos across a 22-month period involving real people in sustainable agriculture, often in remote locations. 

Pradeep feels that anyone can take a good photograph with modern digital cameras, but most don’t look for emotions or try to tell a story through the image. With the advent of AI, social media and many other developments, photography seems to have lost its importance and there are few platforms for it now. Just like everyone else, Pradeep is learning about AI. He feels that it is a vehicle for efficiency, but it cannot replace the raw human empathy and artistic instinct. 

Let us look at the essence of Bengaluru, as seen by Pradeep KS in these assignments.