Category: Life in India
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Day at the Beach
Marina Beach, Chennai, India
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Indian Portraits from the 1950s and 1960s
Between Chennai and Pondicherry is an area with an especially high proliferation of “junk stores. I suppose the owners would prefer we’d call them antique shops – but there actually aren’t that many actual antiques, just lots of oddities and strange treasures, many of which are made to look old. In the back of one…
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Random Scenes from Bangalore
We took a stroll through “Gandhi Bazaar” in Bangalore – also known as “Basavanagudi” – last weekend, and I thought I share some random – if occasionally odd – photos. The first photo is literally a bunch of leaves. It’s “paan” – or betel leaves. These leaves are used to wrap a mixture of substances…
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Impressions of Koyambedu
Koyambedu Wholesale Market Complex is one of Asia’s largest perishable goods market complexes. Spread over an area of 295 acres, the complex consists of more than 1,000 wholesale shops and 2,000 retail shops. The market has two blocks for vegetable shops and one each for fruit and flower shops. In Phase II, a textile market, and in Phase III,…
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Photographing Chennai’s Kids
A number of different photographer groups in Chennai regularly organize photowalks – walks through various neighborhoods in Chennai. The potential photographic subjects will vary – sometimes it’s market vendors, or stately old buildings, still life, fishing villages. In certain situations, exercising your abilities as a photographer can be difficult, because – rather than you seeking…
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Checking in with Rocky
I recently had the opportunity to meet Rocky Braat, the subject of an amazing documentary called “Blood Brother,” winner of both the Audience and Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2013. The film tells the story of a disillusioned young American who goes to India to find meaning in his life and finds it at an…
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Kasimedu Fishing Harbor
At the northern end of Chennai’s coast, just north of the Chennai port, where, at any given time, hundreds of trucks stretch in a long line waiting to load or unload goods, is Kasimedu fishing harbor – also known as Royapuram fishing harbor, for the town section nearby. The harbor has a capacity of 575…
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Repurposing Indian Doors
If you have an old camera or two, it looks nice on a bookshelf with a couple of hardcover books. But what do you do with 75 old cameras? Who has that many bookshelves? It seemed a shame to have them packed away out of sight, but I wondered what kind of shelves would be…
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We Two Ours One
As foreigners living in India, we constantly see things around us that leave us scratching our heads. There’s simply not enough time to chase them all down and figure out what they mean, so often we just accept them and move on, and eventually stop noticing. But every now and then, we figure one out.…
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Chennai: Textures
I’ve posted before about Chennai’s endless walls and the fact that many of them get postered, painted, repainted and repostered. This creates interesting textures; so much so, that one of my predecessors did an entire photographic exhibition on just that theme – and sold many of his photos to boot! When I heard about that,…
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Chennai: Grit and Grain
In Namibia, photography was all about long lenses, tripods, “the golden hour”, and finding the right guide. Since moving to Chennai, a large city in India, the lenses have gotten much shorter, shooting is sometimes instinctive; and sweeping landscapes have made way for the grit and grime of everyday human life, toil, and aging buildings.…
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Chennai’s Walls: an Endless Canvas
Chennai is full of walls. Many of them are marked “stick no bills” – and people will generally abide by that request. But the majority end up being political advertising space. The successive layers of paint upon paint, posters upon posters are accepted as a part of the texture of the city, and are rarely…
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Badrian Street and the Flower Market
Badrian Street or “Budirian Street” as it is painted on the street sign, is the site of Chennai’s old wholesale flower market. While technically, the vendors in what is commonly known as “poo-k-kadai,” sell “wholesale”, their typical clients are ladies who buy less than a kilogram of flowers, typically to be woven into garlands using banana…
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Goa is for the Birds – Literally
Just north of Panaji, Goa’s “small but spritely” capital, where the Mapusa and Mandovi Rivers meet, is what appears to be an island – Chorao Island – which has 11,000 inhabitants, and whose western end is a 1.8 square kilometer mangrove forest known as the Dr. Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary. Looking at the map, it…
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Vintage Camera Test: No 2 Hawkeye Model C Anniversary Edition
This week’s vintage camera test is an interesting one (yes, but aren’t they all?), despite its rather long name. Waaaay back in the late 1880s, a small company called the Boston Camera Company introduced a model called the “Hawk-Eye” Detective camera. The Hawk-Eye Detective camera was unique in 1888 because it enclosed all of the…
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Guindy National Park
Smack in the middle of Chennai is a 2.8 square-kilometer national park – one of India’s smallest – which is an extension of the Tamil Nadu Governor’s residence. Along its fringes can be found the Snake Park, which I’ve posted about previously, and the Childrens’ Park, which on most days is filled with uniformed schoolchildren…
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At the Fair – Chennai Style
There’s a place in north-central Chennai where they set up the local “fair.” Called the “Island Grounds”, it’s the site of the 40th Tourism and Trade Fair. To be honest, we skipped most of the trade fair itself, but found the traditional rides-and-games-and-unhealthy-food part of the fair to be quite interesting, both from a cultural…
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Testing the Agfa Silette Rapid F
When I’m considering vintage cameras for purchase, I specifically look for cameras that still appear to work, and for which film can still be acquired somehow. Then, periodically, I grab a couple and test them out. This week, it’s the Agfa Silette Rapid F. This is actually one of the first cameras I acquired; when…
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Documenting the Dhobis
British soldiers may know the terms “doing your dhobi” (laundry) and “dhobi dust” (detergent) – but they may not be aware of these terms’ origins. A photographer friend recently spent several hours negotiating, on behalf of a small group of photographers, entry into a local “dhobi khana” or “dhobi ghat” – i.e. a community where…
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Mylapore’s Annual Kolam Contest
When I first arrived in southern India, I blogged about the “kolams” made by millions of women in India every day. So it turns out this is also a competitive sport of sorts! Over the last four days, the Mylapore Festival has been ongoing, and one of its main attractions has been the kolam contest. [side…
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Christmas Photowalk
This Christmas, several of us got things like lenses and other camera-related items in our stockings. So it was quite natural that we decided to take a “family photowalk” on Christmas Day, especially given that we are living in a foreign country, far from the close friends and family we might ordinarily be visiting over…
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Hanging Around in Hyderabad (Post #3)
For my third and final post on our trip to Hyderabad, I’m sharing a roll of Tri-X 400 film (black and white) I shot with my Ricoh Super Kr-5 II, a camera that’s barely vintage, having been manufactured in the mid-1990s. And, amazingly, for a roll of 36 photos, every single shot came out in…
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Hanging Around in Hyderabad (2nd Post)
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend a week working in Hyderabad, a city of 7 or so million in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (which is in the process of splitting into two states – but that is another story). During my work week, I had little to no time…
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The Argus Seventy-Five: Great Photos for a So-Called “Toy” Camera
The Argus 75, also marketed as the Argus Seventy-Five and the Argoflex Seventy-Five*, is a bakelite pseudo TLR made by the Argus company between 1949 and 1964. It’s a simple, inexpensive, yet reliable little box camera that you would hang around your neck, look down into the large, clear viewfinder, and snap photos at waist…
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Hanging Around in Hyderabad
I had the opportunity to spend a bit of time in Hyderabad, India’s fourth-largest city. It has some very interesting and historically significant buildings and monuments, centuries-old bazaars, and the ancient ruins of an old fort – as well as friendly and interesting people. Here are some of my initial impressions – more to be…