The magazine of the photo-essay
Nov / Dec 2020 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by Thierry Clech
It is unclear whether this country emanates from a dream or a nightmare, whether one
watches over it or sleeps within it, to the point of being convinced that one has seen what
is not there, or of imagining oneself to be the victim of a delusion in the face of the
tangible apparition of Indian horrors and lunacies.
This crazy and perpetual swarming of the subcontinent’s cities as soon as dawn breaks,
amid this smell that cannot be defined, at least not without breaking it down into its
elements—spices, sewage, sweat, urine, incense, cardamom, burning garbage,
moldering stones after the monsoon, fried food, jasmine—this blaring bedlam on
asphalt cloaked in the acrid, torrid smoke of the exhaust pipes—archaic buses, dying cars,
rickshaws patched up a hundred times over—this concert of anarchic horns that, in
warning everything no longer warns anything, in the evening it all collapses into silence to
contemplate water and fire in Mumbai, Pondicherry, Chennai, Haridwar, facing the
Ganges, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, or the Bay of Bengal. The grand spectacle
that occurs when the sun sets, each day it is as if they are seeing it for the first or last
time, dressed in their multicolored saris, their rags, and those white skirts that the men fold up and tie over their thighs,
evoking a type of swaddling. And when, at dusk, the star of the sea and the river dwindles behind the horizon and they
light their rudimentary candles—clarified butter and cotton wick—and deposit them on the waves in flower bowls, these
hundreds of small flames seem to reflect thebrightness of the stars scattered across the celestial vault. Lights that
ricochet, from the heart of darkness, through the universe and across eternity.
Mamallapuram
Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2010
Thierry Clech
Kolkata, 2010
Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2017
Thierry Clech
Kochi, 2009
Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2010
Thierry Clech
Kolkata, 2010.
Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2017.
Thierry Clech
Kolkata, 2010
Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2017
Thierry Clech