I spent March in India, my second trip there. My hosts invited me on a long road trip north from Delhi into Uttarakhand, so I was shooting from the car a lot and became fascinated with the process. It’s like riding inside a film camera that moves without your control; all I can do is grab stills that appear in the moving frame as scenes stream by.
Usually I approach a subject on foot, with time to try different angles and think about composition. It’s impossible to do that from a moving vehicle -- I don’t control where we’re going, can’t predict what I’m going to see, and never get a second chance. For every picture I take, I see another shot that I missed.
The great reward of the moving frame is when things come together accidentally, and spontaneously create compositions that I wouldn't have set up intentionally, with coincidences I couldn't have arranged. Of course, it's not completely fortuitous; I'm shooting a lot of frames and selecting images afterward.
By their nature these images include technical defects, such as motion blur, misplaced focus, or high ISO noise. I consider these to be vital, because they express how the images came about.
Whenever I publish photos from India I feel like I need to add: I make no claim that these somehow represent life in India. I don’t believe that any photo series can truly capture the life of even a neighborhood, much less a country -- least of all one as vast and diverse as India.
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