A contemporary lens-based artist, Anup Mathew Thomas works at the intersection of artistic and documentary representational practices and draws on various genres — fashion, photojournalism and portraiture — to explore their relationships with their personal and public contexts. His practice is primarily concerned with finding ways to represent contemporary microhistories and subcultures in everyday imagery, and particularly the cultural histories of Kerala. Thomas composes most of his work in the form of series, and presents them either as prints or digital projections or slideshows. He uses a narrative style, which weaves together personal and public anecdotes, to reveal larger, collective histories and traditions of his human subjects. His work, often presented in the form of photo-installations, is also a reflection of his interest in the instrumental history of his chosen medium and its negotiation of the complexities of representation. Thomas was born in Kochi, Kerala and graduated with a Diploma in Art and Design from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru in 2003.

Thomas’ early works were of a personal and familial nature, with his focus shifting to, often topical, socio-cultural concerns. His first solo exhibition titled Passer By (2002) presented images taken during a trip to Western Europe in 1999. The biographical series on his father, Well This is About Thomas Jacob (2003), showed his father’s life across various locations, accompanied by short narratives. His photo-installation, Light Life (2005), which documented the dance bar spaces in Mumbai, devoid of human activity, was created in response to the State government’s ban on the city’s dance bars on grounds of their moral decrepitude. He worked on two series in Lahore, Pakistan in 2006 – NCA Library, which sampled images from the security cameras at the library of the National College of Art, Lahore and New Friends, featuring portraits of artist friends who instructed him on how to photograph or document them. Thomas’ interest in exploring power relations in and through photographic portraiture is seen in his works Metropolitan (2006) and Cabinet (2007). Metropolitan features over fourteen large-format photographs of presiding or supreme bishops of various churches in Kerala. Cabinet further explores portraiture as a medium in itself, by splicing together a slideshow of bust portraits of the then-cabinet ministers from the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government in Kerala. Thomas’ installation Assembly (2008) recreated the spatial environment of state functions by placing red plastic chairs in front of a screen decorated with false arches and paraphernalia. Thomas explores diverse micro-communities, places and people from Kerala in series such as View from Connolly’s Plot (2010), Hereinafter (2012), Nurses (2014), Native Ball and Revisions (2014) and Scene from a Wake (2016). Themes of death, community and memory are often interspersed in his works, which are accompanied by short texts that add context to the images.