South Indian women bodybuilders flex in London-based Keerthana Kunnath’s award-winning photographs

London-based photographer Keerthana Kunnath explores nuanced themes through art, challenging beauty standards and gender stereotypes in her work.

London-based photographer Keerthana Kunnath often uses the term art when referring to her photos dealing with nuanced themes, such as gender, sexuality, womanhood and mental health. Originally from Beypore in Kozhikode, Kerala, the 29-year-old shutterbug aims to spark conversations about themes that “people often shy away from”.

Her last photo series, Not What You Saw, portrays South Indian women bodybuilders flexing their muscles garbed in traditional Kerala attire, like a kasavu mundu (handloom garment with zari border) wrapped around their waist and thighs or a checkered fabric skirt inspired by fisherwomen. These photographs question outdated beauty standards and gender stereotypes. 

The series has earned Keerthana, The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain’s International Photography Exhibition Awards in the Under 30s category in February, 2025. “I wanted to portray these girls as confident. They are not just challenging the ideals of beauty, but they also dare to go to these competitions wearing bikinis and pose in front of so many people,” says Keerthana over a phone call from Mumbai. 

“I was researching on kalaripayattu (martial art from Kerala), when I stumbled upon this group of body-builder girls,” says Keerthana who started working on this series in early 2024. “Everyone had seen body builders in typical gym clothes but they haven’t seen an Indian body builder in clothes which are inspired from our culture . My friend Elton John, a Thiruvananthapuram-based stylist and I, didn’t want to make it just the saree, we wanted something fun and fashionable with some cultural inspiration in mind.”

Keerthana shot the models using an old analogue medium format camera, Mamiya 67, at locations spread across different parts of Kerala and Karnataka. She says, “I just decided to do this as a personal project. I didn’t even share it with an editor for around six months after shooting it. Last summer I shot a few more pictures and I am still working on this series. I never had an end goal in mind.”

Additionally, Keerthana’s works were recently featured in the British rom-com Picture This, released in March 2025, as those shot by the protagonist Pia (played by Simone Ashley). “They wanted to use my archives and also shoot the images the character was shooting which would go in the film,” says Keerthana, who was approached by the makers of the film after they stumbled upon her Instagram profile.

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