With his dad’s Nikon D7000 camera, Manoo Sirivelu’s only concept of photography was capturing photos of family vacations and field trips at his boarding school in India. Sirivelu did not realize what photojournalism was, but now 10 years later, he is an award-winning photographer for documenting the stories inside the communities around him.

Sirivelu is an Austin-based photographer, journalist and a student at the University of Texas at Austin majoring with the Plan II Honors Program. Currently, he freelances for KUT and The Washington Post in Austin. He previously served as the photo editor of The Daily Texan.

“Photojournalism is able to provide people with a level of truth,” Sirivelu said. “That access to empathy, so that they can feel directly what’s going on behind the screen.”

Spring of last year, Sirivelu documented the pro-Palestinian protests at UT Austin. It was his first real-world assignment where his photographs were later published in The Guardian. Additionally, he won the Award of Excellence in the Spot News category from the College Photographer of the Year competition.

“It was painful, but also an incredible opportunity to just be present and get coverage,” Sirivelu said. “It was a very awakening and shocking experience. I was pushed down by the police. I needed to be as level-headed as possible because I needed to present the story without any specific angle, bias or perspective.”

Last summer, Sirivelu visited Ireland for the Maymester program under Professor Donna De Cesare for documentary storytelling in Dublin. He went alongside other student photographers to cover a range of different social justice issues, from LGTBQ+ rights to immigration asylum seekers. Sirivelu focused on the housing crisis, where the high cost has led some to choose a sustainable way of living through houseboats.

“I’m very fortunate to meet this incredible community to welcome me into their homes and show me what was going on,” Sirivelu said. “They’re connected to the rest of the country through the canals that the boats go through.”

Sirivelu won gold in the College Photographer of the Year International Picture Story category for the photographs he took in Ireland. This year, Sirivelu will go back to Ireland as a teaching assistant.

“I wanted to go there to show how important this community is,” Sirivelu said. “I’m going to go back to provide more coverage and finish their story. I want to get the article published so the rest of the country can be aware of some level of what’s going on.”

More recently, in August 2024, Sirivelu photographed Austin’s annual Pride Parade for KUT News, Austin’s NPR station.

“Austin’s a unique place for art overall,” Sirivelu said. “It’s just an incredibly diverse and cultural space that unfortunately is also losing so much of it. People are continuing to fight for their city and fight for their home, fight for their culture and their art and I will continue to shoot with my camera.”

Along with showcasing the Austin Pride Parade, Sirivelu had the opportunity to cover Austin City Limits in October for The Daily Texan. Some of the artists he was able to photograph were The Marias, Remi Wolf, Chappel Roan and DAIISTAR.

“Covering things like ACL, life and arts are just as important as covering protests,” Sirivelu said. “Because one end you have us fighting for what is ours, that’s protesting, but also, life in the arts is the triumph of the human condition. It’s celebrating the good parts of it, celebrating what went right.”

Sirivelu has realized that most of his works have a common theme of home, and the idea of home. From his cul-de-sac childhood in Tampa, Florida to boarding school and rural India to now Austin, his homes showed him what love means.

“The fear I feel is no longer of being ignored, but oppressed,” Sirivelu said in his submission to a competition. “It chose my images and the stories I seek of people who love their home, despite being forced out time and time again, from peaceful student protests to pride parades, the subjects of my images have fought and will continue to fight for their home.”

Sirivelu joined The Daily Texan in September of 2023, leading him to make connections with other journalists and news outlets. He discovered the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) through The Daily Texan.

“I see pictures around me all the time that I’m inspired by, that come from the same spaces that I’m in,” Sirivelu said. “I learn so much from people around me every day. It’s important to continuously be inspired and learn alongside my peers.”

Sirivelu says photojournalism is not a profession that is as comforting as it once was, with newsrooms eliminating their photography departments. He notes that photographers are being paid less, making it harder to live off of it.

“It’s not without the sacrifices,” Sirivelu said. “A lot of my time and life on a daily basis goes to my photography. So it feels good to know that it matters.”

Taking fine art classes has expanded Sirivelu’s awareness to photography. He is able to take film photos and develop and print them in a darkroom, a room where film can be developed without exposure to light.

“Fine arts photography and photojournalism are two different worlds that don’t really collide very often,” Sirivelu said. “I think that the collision is very important. There’s so many ways that fine arts photography tells better stories sometimes than photojournalism because it can represent things in your personal ways. The stories are still important. It’s just that the medium is different. And the way that they reach your empathy is different.”

*As seen in print