Behind The Cover
Photographs, for me, always serve as a powerful medium of bringing about stories that can be visualized by the audience. Through my frames, I wish to knit personal tales, which present a glimpse of day-to-day life, while I make a conscious attempt to integrate it with the larger social environment and thought process. I find street photography to be the best way achieve the dual purpose because I believe the best stories are on the streets. I try to keep post processing to a minimum, and avoid doing major alterations to the photographs I click. I tend to focus more on the colours and tones, tweak and adjust them to add more dimension and layer.
This photograph, from the vibrant fair markets of Pushkar, was clicked somewhere during early November, a time when the small town is packed with temple devotees and tourists, all come to witness the famous ‘Pushkar Fair’. The town has seen widespread migration, with people departing for bigger cities in search of work, while the remaining few try to make ends meet in shops and service outlets catering to tourists. This frame from the fair grounds, far away from the hustle and bustle of markets represented to me a culture forgotten due to rising urbanisation and mass migration. The man in the turban, clad in an outfit common to small towns and villages of Rajasthan, fits perfectly in the frame with the camels used to allure tourists. To me, the picture and the fair represents a bygone past, a struggling culture that is slowly losing ground as it surrenders to the many demands of modernity. It aligns with the theme of displacement, speaking of a place that remains isolated in space and time.