When 20-year-old Rasiya Banu first picked up a DSLR camera, she was terrified.

Growing up in Vyasarpadi, a working-class neighbourhood in North Chennai, she had become accustomed to hearing outsiders describe her locality with words like “dangerous”, “dirty”, or “rowdy area”. The labels followed her into classrooms and colleges. They shaped how others saw her before they knew her name.

Today, Rasiya uses photography to challenge those assumptions.

Through her lens, she documents football players, flood survivors, sanitation workers, grieving families, and the everyday lives of women in her neighbourhood. Each image becomes an act of reclaiming a story that others have long told on behalf of her community.

“People here are not as others describe. They are not criminals, and this place is not dirty,” she says, as she recalls her photography journey.

Rasiya is one among several young photographers mentored by Chennai-based documentary photographer M Palanikumar through Vyasai Thozhargal, a grassroots collective in Vyasarpadi that works with children and first-generation learners. 

Over the past few years, the initiative has evolved beyond education support into something more ambitious: helping young people discover the power of visual storytelling and use it to represent their own realities.

In a neighbourhood often reduced to headlines and stereotypes, cameras have become tools of confidence, creativity, and social change.

A locality that refuses to be defined by stigma

To understand why photography matters so deeply here, one must first understand Vyasarpadi.

For decades, North Chennai neighbourhoods such as Vyasarpadi have been portrayed through a narrow lens. Popular culture frequently associates the area with crime, violence, poverty, or social unrest. Residents have repeatedly spoken about the discrimination they face simply because of their address.

“Try taking a taxi to Vyasarpadi,” Palanikumar says. “Most drivers will refuse to come inside.”

Yet the reality is far more complex.

Behind the stereotypes are communities built on resilience, solidarity, labour, and aspiration. Families work long hours to support children's education. Women run households under difficult circumstances. Young people dream of becoming journalists, engineers, lawyers, artists, and teachers.

Many of these stories rarely make it into mainstream narratives. That gap is precisely what Vyasai Thozhargal seeks to address.

Founded in 2014 by first-generation graduates from the locality, the collective began as an educational movement focused on ensuring that children from the neighbourhood remained in school. One of its most visible initiatives is Dr Ambedkar Pagutharivu........

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