“As a child, I was always drawn to nature—especially clouds. Their shifting forms felt like stories unfolding in the sky. I was born and raised in Hyderabad. My father was a journalist with a Telugu daily, and my mother a homemaker. In Grade 3, I moved to a boarding school in Nalgonda. Those open landscapes made me observe the sky closely, and I began writing poems in Urdu, Telugu, and English.
By Grade 8, I started photographing clouds using my father’s old keypad phone. Friends found it strange, but I didn’t stop. In 2011, I captured a cloud that resembled the 1983 World Cup trophy, just before India’s win. In 2013, I began documenting clouds seriously. During the Telangana agitation, I photographed a cloud shaped like the Telangana map.
In 2018, 80 of my cloud images were exhibited at the ICCR Art Gallery with the support of Dr Mamidi Harikrishna Garu. One image later became part of an anti-drug campaign by Hyderabad Police, while another showed a Kohinoor-shaped cloud between the minarets of Charminar.
My work has since been displayed in schools, colleges, and public spaces, including an exhibition of over 100 animal-shaped clouds at Nehru Zoological Park. So far, I’ve captured more than 18,600 cloud photographs.
In 2021, I presented the photography exhibition Devarakonda – Life in a Century. In 2023, I decided to expand this vision into a film using Artificial Intelligence. By early 2025, I shared a one-minute preview with Dr Mamidi Harikrishna Garu. After seven months of work, it evolved into a 58-minute Telugu AI documentary chronicling 100 years of Devarakonda’s history.
The film was launched at Ravindra Bharathi and formally declared India’s first AI-generated documentary made using a century’s worth of photographs.
Recently, my documentation of the 13th-century Devarakonda Fort earned recognition from Telangana Tourism at the ‘100 Weekend Wonders of Telangana’ contest, where I received a Heritage category consolation award. What began by watching the sky has now become a way of preserving stories on the ground.”
— Younus Farhaan, Cloud Photographer & AI Filmmaker