Shravan Vidyarthi

African Lens: The Story of Priya Ramrakha

Shravan Vidyarthi

After Kenyan photojournalist Priya Ramrakha was killed on assignment in Biafra, Nigeria, in 1968, his photographic legacy and archive seemed to vanish. Four decades later, his relative, Shravan Vidyarthi, found his prints and negatives in Nairobi. Covered in dust and all but forgotten, the 100,000 images that make up his archive trace the short life of one of the most prolific photographers of Africa’s independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2004, Shravan started to retrace Priya Ramrakha’s life story, talking to journalists, family and friends and using a handful of images in family collections that would become the basis for his documentary film, African Lens: The Story of Priya Ramrakha.