INDIA

They say India will change you. After my first visit in 2013, I can confirm that India did indeed change me.

It is a remarkable, shocking, beautiful, complex, busy and magnetic place.

As you’ll see below, for me it very quickly became about the people. The people of India are incredible. There is constant engagement, conversation and curiosity. I struggle to put together a gallery of images because I want you to see them all. But I’ve tried.

I came back from my last trip with around 4TB of video and a couple of ideas I wanted to explore. One was a question that kept going around in my head: how is it possible for people to seem so calm and relaxed in a place that can feel so overwhelmingly intense?

The slow-motion film you see here came from that thought. Perhaps slowing everything down gives some sense of the pace at which the people who live there actually see and feel it.

I also created a body of work around the interactions I have with people while making their portraits. I always engage with people before making a portrait. Always. And I started to notice a pattern. We engage, they agree to the photograph, they “pose”, and then, when they think it’s over, something changes. They relax, smile, laugh, get excited. The performance of having their portrait taken disappears.

So I used a video camera that is almost indistinguishable from a stills camera and recorded at 100fps. I would lift the camera and they would think I was making a still photograph, but I was actually recording the entire interaction.

In some of those recordings you can see all three stages of the portrait unfold: the anticipation, the pose, and then the person returning.

At some point I’m going to create something longer from my last trip. I met up with a couple of amazing friends I’d previously only known online, travelled with them, made a ridiculous amount of work, and we had an absolute blast.

I’ll be back, my good old friend India.