Delhi in Black and White

As I’ve always said, some cities have a soul—something deep and secret. You can get an inkling of it but it would take you years to understand and penetrate what it really is.

Delhi was not such a city. I always felt my images in Delhi came out cold in a way it it naturally possessed something when I photographed Calcutta or New York, even Paris these days.

Perhaps it is my relationship to Delhi but I was happy there, the five years I lived there. On the surface yes, but still, happy.

I suppose, in retrospect, I knew there was nothing in Delhi that was really mine.

My friend’s mother, Sally, whose husband was an artist from the Warhol period, sensed this in my images right away and I’m all the more glad that she told me so.

Either way, in those five years I did manage to accumulate some collection, which at times reminds me of Steve McCurry and I quickly want to erase them.

But a lot of us photographers here have seen each others’ good and bad and I wanted to show them these, how different my images can be when my heart is not in it.

May be you can tell, may be you can’t.

They’re pretty, because anything with a mosque and a bird and a stray dog can be picturesque. But they lack a depth that came naturally in my images of Calcutta and New York. Perhaps it is called belonging.

They’re as blank as a tourists’, passing by. Observing, with a touch of irony. But there is no deep love, not in the way I felt for the other places.

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