Rakesh Pulapa is an Indian travel and aerial photographer based in Rajahmundry. Trained as a computer science engineer, he moved from photography as a hobby into a full-time practice, flying drones over landscapes and cities across Asia and Europe. He has won over 50 national and international awards, including the HIPA award and a Natural History Museum award, and his photographs have appeared in CNN, BBC, Forbes, and Time.
His 2017 aerial photograph Dichotomy., taken by drone over Rajahmundry, shows a hard, near-ruler-straight line dividing dense residential roofs from an ordered field of palms. Pulapa describes the ordered side of the image as a jail facility and the other as a residential neighbourhood, using the aerial view to ask what confinement and freedom can look like from above, though the facility itself remains unidentified in the public record. As of August 2026 the work had been selected through the 6529 Museum Network's Keys and Gates acquisition program but had not yet been minted or added to the permanent collection. In 2025 he also made the digital work Liquid Canvas.
