Kerala, published by 5 Continents Editions in December 2004, brings together Johnathan Watts’s photographs of Hindu temple festivals in the southern Indian state, with attention to ritual, music, and dance. The project grew from museum research visits made between 1998 and 2003, giving the book a sustained rather than incidental engagement with its subject. Its focus is not Kerala as scenic backdrop, but the ceremonies and performative traditions through which communal and religious life becomes visible.

Ethnologist Laurent Aubert’s text accompanies Watts’s photographs, extending the visual record through cultural interpretation. The collaboration connects the immediacy of the images with the sustained fieldwork from which the publication emerged. The subject calls for close looking—at gesture, costume, movement, instruments, crowds, and the charged spaces of temple festivals—while the written contribution provides a parallel framework for understanding what the camera records. The research is associated with the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, linking this photographic account to the museum’s study of ritual and performance.

For collectors, Kerala deserves attention as a carefully defined document of ritual culture, shaped by repeated field visits and presented in a substantial 160-page hardcover volume. The English edition’s 28 × 24 cm format offers room for photographs to function as sequences rather than isolated illustrations, while the collaboration with Aubert places the work within a broader ethnographic and museum context. It is a book to read slowly: its significance lies in the sustained relation between photographic observation, cultural knowledge, and the collective life of Kerala’s festivals.