Unni Krishnan Pulikkal, a master fine art and nature photographer who lives in Kerala, India, was born in 1969, in a remote Thrissurian village Chettichal. His involvement in art dates back to his childhood days when he started drawing with pencils and charcoals, water colours and then moved on to acrylics and oils in his college days, with many certificates of merits and awards to his credit. Later, under the influence of images by great photographers like Ansel Adams, he shifted his creative showground to photography in early 1998. With a rich background in fine arts, it was quite an innate spontaneous process for him to capture great imagery with his photographic tools, always adding his creative thoughts to enrich what the external eyes visualized."

"In his pursuit for quality image-making, he came across much recognition as a natural outcome of his perseverance. The Royal Photographic Society, London, awarded him their prestigious title ARPS (Associate of Royal Photographic Society) in 2008; the Better Photography Magazine voted him one among the Top Ten Wildlife Photographers of the Nation in Oct.2007; the Limca Book of Records selected him for a record in Nature category as “the first Indian to exhibit butterfly photographs in the prestigious Cleveland Museum of Natural Hisoty, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, in 2007”. Many of his work have been published nationally and internationally. His photographic work has appeared in reputed magazines like Better Photography, Times Journal of Photoraphy, Discover India, Naturalli Magazine, Outlook Traveller, Fotowide, Fototrax , Swagat magazine of Air India etc., with many of his images appearing on the front cover. His scientific work on the biology of many butterflies of the Western Ghats has received much acclaim among the scientific community and Bombay Natural History Society’s Journal has accepted his scientific paper for publication. Unni Pulikkal, a member of National Geographic Society, is the founder director of the Butterfly Art Foundation, India, (www.bafindia.org) a visual arts organization of Kerala. His award wining work has been exhibited in many galleries around the nation as well.

The greatest influence on his photographic work was his experience with Ansal Adams’ original black and whites in the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007. The same year, he got further inspiration from the work of America’s master photographer and platinum print maker Herbert Ascherman Jr of Cleveland, who trained him in the aesthetics and techniques of archival print making."