Although he wanted to be a doctor, that was not to be and he joined Gandhi's personal staff at Wardha where he supervised clerical, correspondence and accounting functions from 1936 till 1948.
The industrialist GD Birla, an associate of Gandhi's gave Kanu ₹ 100 to buy his camera, a Rolleiflex, and a roll of film.
[1][8] Kanu met the costs of photography through a monthly stipend of ₹ 100 paid to him by Amritlal Gandhi of Vandemataram who had purchased a photograph of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel from him.
[7][9] Kanu however was forbidden by Gandhi from capturing Kasturba's last moments as she lay dying on his lap during his incarceration at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune.
[5] Kanu's interest in photography came to an end with Gandhi's assassination although he did undertake a few assignments including one in famine affected Bihar in the 1950s.
His work thus forms what The Independent called a corpus of "naturally-lit black-and-white photographs, which offer an extraordinary insider's view of Gandhi's life".
[10] Kanu's original photographs remained in obscurity until they were acquired by a German collector, Peter Ruhe, in the 1980s who traced similar material and began to market them.
In 1995, the first international exhibition of Kanu's photographs was staged at the Leicester Museum & Art Gallery through the efforts of the London based artist Saleem Arif.