Stranger No. 43

Pooja lives at a “dhobikhana” in Chennai. This is a facility built by the British in the early 1900s, where thousands of Indians have been employed over the last century washing, drying and ironing clothes. This particular dhobikhana is the second largest in India. The people who work here have an uncertain future, because their job is being replaced by machines. Still, the day I visited, there were hundreds of people hard at work beating clothes and sheets on rocks, and hanging them to try. Pooja was heading to school and posed for these photographs.

The top photo is taken on expired Ilford film using an Argus Seventy-five camera, manufactured around 1950 or so. The bottom one is taken with a Kodak Monitor, a sophisticated camera for 1948 that once belonged to a sailor stationed aboard the USS New Jersey, a US warship, in the Korean War.