before I present a selection of my
pictures I would like to share with you
something about the process I have
developed all these years one from all
these the processes I have developed
while working from the birth of an idea
to its desired end which generally is a
book followed by an exhibition so where
do my ideas come from the triggers that
inform my ideas are varied and numerous
some ideas I fall into by chance
others are generated from memory of a
place a person a thing a time or by
space or even an object or a particular
situation my most recent project which I
have just completed was inspired by one
single village photography studio that
led me to find 70 more in the country
but more about that later
I have learnt the hard way that most
ideas that for me just don’t work the
few that do are the result of very hard
work I also learned that thoughts and
ideas need to be explored before
embarking on a project or after a
project but not during the actual act of
photography that act needs to be
spontaneous and fluid as I’m not a
commercial photographer working in
accordance with the brief my work
generates many surprises and experience
teaches you which surprise to go with
and so it is quite often that good
pictures are somewhat intuitive today
I’m going to share with you the ideas
that have helped me in my work I will
begin with examples from my earliest
work and end with my most recent first
what makes a good picture
you do need some key ingredients and
these the basic ones are light form
timing and luck the perfect picture
according to the great French
photographer Orry Cartier Bresson is a
combination of all of these as
happen in a fraction of a second and
these require the heart the mind and the
eye to work in sync he called it the
decisive moment on the process of
photography he said it is seldom you
make a great picture you have to milk
the cow a lot to get plenty of milk to
make a little cheese i milked a lot of
cows to produce my first book title
Bombay mix which was a compendium of
street pictures taken over 20 years now
when I look back at my contact sheets I
can recognize in them my training ground
as a photographer there were some hits
but there were a lot of misses from this
work I have chosen five images to show
you for their recognition of a moment
one of the first lessons I booked to
practice as I started as a photographer
here we see the moment that a child
performer is hurled into an unending sky
I feel we are more fearful for her than
she seems to be for herself
next we catch a moment of three moods
and gestures the pencil pensive richly
attired phallic her furry clad sister
who’s jumped into the frame as she seen
me and her board rather distracted
grandmother they’re all going somewhere
we don’t know where they’re going and
when they’re going but this was a moment
that I was able to catch the next is a
more dense picture a more crowded
picture it’s off a street wedding in a
Muslim neighborhood in Bombay where
there are singers who live in cotys and
the groom has just come in he shouted
he’s being welcomed by a failed member
of the bride’s family and neither of
them can see what I’m seeing through my
camera which is the various mood
and gestures of the wedding party around
them here here are you can see a woman
smeared with ash on her face and she
looks as if she’s in a trance she seems
unaware of the festive crowd around her
while the goddess gallery behind her
seems to protect her and here we see a
moment of a sleeping man it’s as if his
fatigue has seeped into the basket of
coals behind him and he’s in a dream and
we just don’t know when he will wake up
so we all benefit from an inspirational
teacher my mentor was Raghubir Singh the
great Indian photographer who passed
away in 1999 when he was only 57 he
helped me not just foster my visual and
technical skills but he taught me really
importantly how easy it is to miss a
good picture and how easy it is to make
bad pictures as cartier-bresson said on
the process because by the time you
press your arm the shutter once more and
maybe the picture was in between
Raghubir also made me aware of my
strengths and my weaknesses I was better
upfront and personal when taking
photographs I was more daunted in large
crowds it was a weakness he helped me
overcome and the only way I could
overcome it was to go out everyday into
the crowd and take pictures in those
days there was no internet so he
introduced me to the great masters
through books so I had all the hundred
books of all the great masters of
photography from Eugene Archie to Gary
Wayne Oh grand and he also privileged me
by introducing me to some great American
photographers who has friends Lee
Friedlander William get me and Bill
christenbury all of whose dark rooms I
had the good fortune of seeing in person
I began to see what made them such
pioneers each a master with a unique
vision for cartier-bresson aw it was the
moment for Gary winner grand it was the
tilt for Robert Frank
it was the poetry of America and for
Diane Arbus the often controversial
sometimes grotesque
but always haunting portraits of
marginalized people I started my career
using the fast and magical Leica m6
camera ideally suited to street
photography later I graduated to the
Mamiya m6 a medium format camera which
was slower and better suited to
portraiture i dwelt in this square
format for the next two years to produce
two more books – in spotting in a
certain grace the story of twin spotting
goes like this
after my marriage I moved to London
where in 1995 at a Diwali party hosted
by the Patel community my husband is a
Patel I chanced upon a Patel community
directory an exhaustive record of every
Patel settled in the UK and they were
more than there were Smith’s listing
names addresses birth dates and village
origins in Gujarat and so on browsing
through the directory I noticed many
repeated birth dates which was
indicative of twins in families and then
reminded of the iconic Diane Arbus
picture of twins that was the idea that
just sort of spurred me at that moment I
just thought bizarre as this sounds let
me find all the twins of the Patels in
the UK and I even went to India later
and see if I can do a portrait of this
community through their twins so I found
a hundred sets of twins from the age of
17 months to 70 years and my search took
me beyond London all over the UK and
finally to 40 villages in the chera the
district of Gujarat which was the Patel
homeland so I’ll show you a few pictures
from this so this was the book
so here are Rhydian CD age 7 their
parents migrated from East Africa and
they live in Norbury they run a
dry-cleaning business and here is millon
and Mayu a TV salesman and a bank
accountant in the bedroom that they
share in Anand Gujarat and then we have
shopkeepers Ramesh and Suresh in
Ramesh’s house in Wembley and I call
them my danny davito twins and they were
wonderful people and they had a great
story to tell me so they came if they
migrated from Uganda
they were both post masters in the UK
before they became shopkeepers and
wanting to save every rupee that they
had every pound that they had they
didn’t insure their first shop well it
caught fire and they lost everything
they had already lost everything in
Uganda but by the time I photograph them
they were now running three shops they
were prosperous and they didn’t look
back at all they just said if you can
work hard and have a sense of humor you
will always go ahead so from the Patel
journey I learned that at the turn of
the century two consecutive monsoon
failures in India prodded some young
Patel farmers to seek their fortunes
elsewhere in East Africa like the
forefathers of Ramesh and Suresh and
here are Shilpa and Sheetal the first
set of twins I photographed in their
father’s gleaming first car so their
forefathers should be moved to the next
slide and this is luv and Kush in
Thermage Gujarat and I photograph them
from outside their classroom and I tried
to use the window pane as a kind of
divider to show them as twins but also
to show their difference as well as
their sameness so so so their ancestors
not theirs but the ones in the UK were
their forefathers were dislocated by Idi
Amin in Uganda and homeless they ended
up predominantly
shopkeepers in England thousands of
miles from their country of origin
so my Patel twins then became a visual
record of the sameness and difference of
an enterprising migratory diaspora in
two very different landscapes and
settings in India and the UK and I had
and I had Raghubir in my life who took
this work all over the world to find me
my first publisher and I don’t think I
would have had the guts to do it by
myself so I really thank him for that
it was also by accident that I
encountered the Sydney community driving
through a village in the gear forest on
a family holiday curious how a community
of African origin came to settle in
Gujarat I later discovered their roots
date back to almost thousand years when
they came in three waves as traders
mercenaries Mariners and slaves in
Gujarat they found home and patronage
from a local king who was so impressed
by their line tracking skills and their
loyalty that he gave them two villages
Jambu and Sylvan in the middle of the
gear forest so if you go to the guild
forest you will find two villages of
Sidney’s in in the middle of the forest
others dispersed to Hyderabad Goa and
Karnataka unlike my earlier projects
where I had unfettered access first as a
Bombay native and next because I was
married to a Patel access to the city
was difficult as the community tends to
remain exclusive and not exactly
welcoming of outsiders I had to earn
acceptance and this took time and it
took going and meeting various members
of the community without a camera this
task took a few months and also it meant
journeying to different parts of the
country some quite remote my efforts to
gain their trust would get greatly
abetted by here by been a dynamic
elder who took me under her wings and
helped Prime many closed
my book is dedicated to her and I’d be
happy to show you some pictures so this
is Margie then Hussein they were the
first people I met and I did not
photograph as I entered the village they
were playing carom they had baseball
caps and they looked at me as if to say
just get out of here you know and I
tried to say well I had come there to
meet here by then and all that and they
said well you’ll have to call her you
know she has a phone you know and this
by the time I got to photograph them and
they got to like me it took it took a
couple of months they were uncertain and
suspicious of my motives one of them
asked me are you photographing in black
and white because we’re black another
wanted to know what exactly I was going
to do with these photographs and
photograph photographing the city over
the many years that I did although
enormous ly rewarding for me and made me
privy to the enormous problems affecting
this much neglected community a lot
needs to be done and I hope my pictures
can reach the places to people who can
actually be in a position to do
something can show the next few pictures
next next next Thanks yeah
yet I’m acutely aware that a
photographer’s mission cannot be that of
an anthropologists or a social workers
photographers work to quote the
photographer and writer rod rod Robert
Adams is to affirm life without lying
about it and then to behave in a chord
with our vision next in conclusion I
wish to touch upon how shifts in
technology can can force a change in how
one works
I was wedded to conventional photography
using film and chemistry and working
exclusively in black and white for over
20 years
remarkably late in 2015 I embraced color
and digital photography forced to do so
by dwindling supply of conventional film
and chemistry finally accepting the new
I set out to test my skills and start
where I had once been 25 years ago back
on the street and back with the magical
Leica this time a digital one the m9 and
I walked the streets of a village called
Minori and I’m showing you some pictures
this was my entry into color and it was
here on the streets of Minori that I
stumbled upon a rundown and neglected
photo studio where the germ of a new
idea was then sewn so a year and a half
later I went on to find 70 more Studios
around the country which gave birth to
my newest work title still lives so this
is in Jaipur so I found these old
studios that are all on the brink of
closing down this is Jaipur this is Bob
Nagar Gujarat and this was if you can go
back this was a model of Gandhi that was
a hundred years old because the studio
was a hundred years old and the grandson
who now runs print studio said in those
days children would come to sit
I Gandhi and get themselves photographed
and so I thought it was a very
interesting prop which is of course now
not used that much next this was in
Trivandrum a young Malala boy had come
in to be photographed for something and
I asked him if I could take a picture of
him and this is in my menorah studio
which was called Jagdish photo studio
and it was either so it was a lucky day
for me so the children were all coming
in and the parents and all really
beautifully dressed up and so I had a
very lucky day that day and got some
good pictures this is a village in
Orissa and this is also in Orissa where
the studio owner actually paints his
backdrops and now his trade is coming to
an end because he doesn’t have any
business so I would like to end with a
quote by Robert Adams again on why
people photograph when photograph when
photographers get beyond copying the
achievements of others or just repeating
their own first accidental successes
they learn that they do not know where
in the world they will find pictures so
if you had asked me while I was doing
portraits of Patel twins in the UK
whether I would photograph a Gujarati
speaking African tribe that came
centuries ago to India or whether I
would find 70 village photography
studios at the brink of change mirroring
my own brink of change I would never
even have remotely guessed thank you
[Applause]
pictures I would like to share with you
something about the process I have
developed all these years one from all
these the processes I have developed
while working from the birth of an idea
to its desired end which generally is a
book followed by an exhibition so where
do my ideas come from the triggers that
inform my ideas are varied and numerous
some ideas I fall into by chance
others are generated from memory of a
place a person a thing a time or by
space or even an object or a particular
situation my most recent project which I
have just completed was inspired by one
single village photography studio that
led me to find 70 more in the country
but more about that later
I have learnt the hard way that most
ideas that for me just don’t work the
few that do are the result of very hard
work I also learned that thoughts and
ideas need to be explored before
embarking on a project or after a
project but not during the actual act of
photography that act needs to be
spontaneous and fluid as I’m not a
commercial photographer working in
accordance with the brief my work
generates many surprises and experience
teaches you which surprise to go with
and so it is quite often that good
pictures are somewhat intuitive today
I’m going to share with you the ideas
that have helped me in my work I will
begin with examples from my earliest
work and end with my most recent first
what makes a good picture
you do need some key ingredients and
these the basic ones are light form
timing and luck the perfect picture
according to the great French
photographer Orry Cartier Bresson is a
combination of all of these as
happen in a fraction of a second and
these require the heart the mind and the
eye to work in sync he called it the
decisive moment on the process of
photography he said it is seldom you
make a great picture you have to milk
the cow a lot to get plenty of milk to
make a little cheese i milked a lot of
cows to produce my first book title
Bombay mix which was a compendium of
street pictures taken over 20 years now
when I look back at my contact sheets I
can recognize in them my training ground
as a photographer there were some hits
but there were a lot of misses from this
work I have chosen five images to show
you for their recognition of a moment
one of the first lessons I booked to
practice as I started as a photographer
here we see the moment that a child
performer is hurled into an unending sky
I feel we are more fearful for her than
she seems to be for herself
next we catch a moment of three moods
and gestures the pencil pensive richly
attired phallic her furry clad sister
who’s jumped into the frame as she seen
me and her board rather distracted
grandmother they’re all going somewhere
we don’t know where they’re going and
when they’re going but this was a moment
that I was able to catch the next is a
more dense picture a more crowded
picture it’s off a street wedding in a
Muslim neighborhood in Bombay where
there are singers who live in cotys and
the groom has just come in he shouted
he’s being welcomed by a failed member
of the bride’s family and neither of
them can see what I’m seeing through my
camera which is the various mood
and gestures of the wedding party around
them here here are you can see a woman
smeared with ash on her face and she
looks as if she’s in a trance she seems
unaware of the festive crowd around her
while the goddess gallery behind her
seems to protect her and here we see a
moment of a sleeping man it’s as if his
fatigue has seeped into the basket of
coals behind him and he’s in a dream and
we just don’t know when he will wake up
so we all benefit from an inspirational
teacher my mentor was Raghubir Singh the
great Indian photographer who passed
away in 1999 when he was only 57 he
helped me not just foster my visual and
technical skills but he taught me really
importantly how easy it is to miss a
good picture and how easy it is to make
bad pictures as cartier-bresson said on
the process because by the time you
press your arm the shutter once more and
maybe the picture was in between
Raghubir also made me aware of my
strengths and my weaknesses I was better
upfront and personal when taking
photographs I was more daunted in large
crowds it was a weakness he helped me
overcome and the only way I could
overcome it was to go out everyday into
the crowd and take pictures in those
days there was no internet so he
introduced me to the great masters
through books so I had all the hundred
books of all the great masters of
photography from Eugene Archie to Gary
Wayne Oh grand and he also privileged me
by introducing me to some great American
photographers who has friends Lee
Friedlander William get me and Bill
christenbury all of whose dark rooms I
had the good fortune of seeing in person
I began to see what made them such
pioneers each a master with a unique
vision for cartier-bresson aw it was the
moment for Gary winner grand it was the
tilt for Robert Frank
it was the poetry of America and for
Diane Arbus the often controversial
sometimes grotesque
but always haunting portraits of
marginalized people I started my career
using the fast and magical Leica m6
camera ideally suited to street
photography later I graduated to the
Mamiya m6 a medium format camera which
was slower and better suited to
portraiture i dwelt in this square
format for the next two years to produce
two more books – in spotting in a
certain grace the story of twin spotting
goes like this
after my marriage I moved to London
where in 1995 at a Diwali party hosted
by the Patel community my husband is a
Patel I chanced upon a Patel community
directory an exhaustive record of every
Patel settled in the UK and they were
more than there were Smith’s listing
names addresses birth dates and village
origins in Gujarat and so on browsing
through the directory I noticed many
repeated birth dates which was
indicative of twins in families and then
reminded of the iconic Diane Arbus
picture of twins that was the idea that
just sort of spurred me at that moment I
just thought bizarre as this sounds let
me find all the twins of the Patels in
the UK and I even went to India later
and see if I can do a portrait of this
community through their twins so I found
a hundred sets of twins from the age of
17 months to 70 years and my search took
me beyond London all over the UK and
finally to 40 villages in the chera the
district of Gujarat which was the Patel
homeland so I’ll show you a few pictures
from this so this was the book
so here are Rhydian CD age 7 their
parents migrated from East Africa and
they live in Norbury they run a
dry-cleaning business and here is millon
and Mayu a TV salesman and a bank
accountant in the bedroom that they
share in Anand Gujarat and then we have
shopkeepers Ramesh and Suresh in
Ramesh’s house in Wembley and I call
them my danny davito twins and they were
wonderful people and they had a great
story to tell me so they came if they
migrated from Uganda
they were both post masters in the UK
before they became shopkeepers and
wanting to save every rupee that they
had every pound that they had they
didn’t insure their first shop well it
caught fire and they lost everything
they had already lost everything in
Uganda but by the time I photograph them
they were now running three shops they
were prosperous and they didn’t look
back at all they just said if you can
work hard and have a sense of humor you
will always go ahead so from the Patel
journey I learned that at the turn of
the century two consecutive monsoon
failures in India prodded some young
Patel farmers to seek their fortunes
elsewhere in East Africa like the
forefathers of Ramesh and Suresh and
here are Shilpa and Sheetal the first
set of twins I photographed in their
father’s gleaming first car so their
forefathers should be moved to the next
slide and this is luv and Kush in
Thermage Gujarat and I photograph them
from outside their classroom and I tried
to use the window pane as a kind of
divider to show them as twins but also
to show their difference as well as
their sameness so so so their ancestors
not theirs but the ones in the UK were
their forefathers were dislocated by Idi
Amin in Uganda and homeless they ended
up predominantly
shopkeepers in England thousands of
miles from their country of origin
so my Patel twins then became a visual
record of the sameness and difference of
an enterprising migratory diaspora in
two very different landscapes and
settings in India and the UK and I had
and I had Raghubir in my life who took
this work all over the world to find me
my first publisher and I don’t think I
would have had the guts to do it by
myself so I really thank him for that
it was also by accident that I
encountered the Sydney community driving
through a village in the gear forest on
a family holiday curious how a community
of African origin came to settle in
Gujarat I later discovered their roots
date back to almost thousand years when
they came in three waves as traders
mercenaries Mariners and slaves in
Gujarat they found home and patronage
from a local king who was so impressed
by their line tracking skills and their
loyalty that he gave them two villages
Jambu and Sylvan in the middle of the
gear forest so if you go to the guild
forest you will find two villages of
Sidney’s in in the middle of the forest
others dispersed to Hyderabad Goa and
Karnataka unlike my earlier projects
where I had unfettered access first as a
Bombay native and next because I was
married to a Patel access to the city
was difficult as the community tends to
remain exclusive and not exactly
welcoming of outsiders I had to earn
acceptance and this took time and it
took going and meeting various members
of the community without a camera this
task took a few months and also it meant
journeying to different parts of the
country some quite remote my efforts to
gain their trust would get greatly
abetted by here by been a dynamic
elder who took me under her wings and
helped Prime many closed
my book is dedicated to her and I’d be
happy to show you some pictures so this
is Margie then Hussein they were the
first people I met and I did not
photograph as I entered the village they
were playing carom they had baseball
caps and they looked at me as if to say
just get out of here you know and I
tried to say well I had come there to
meet here by then and all that and they
said well you’ll have to call her you
know she has a phone you know and this
by the time I got to photograph them and
they got to like me it took it took a
couple of months they were uncertain and
suspicious of my motives one of them
asked me are you photographing in black
and white because we’re black another
wanted to know what exactly I was going
to do with these photographs and
photograph photographing the city over
the many years that I did although
enormous ly rewarding for me and made me
privy to the enormous problems affecting
this much neglected community a lot
needs to be done and I hope my pictures
can reach the places to people who can
actually be in a position to do
something can show the next few pictures
next next next Thanks yeah
yet I’m acutely aware that a
photographer’s mission cannot be that of
an anthropologists or a social workers
photographers work to quote the
photographer and writer rod rod Robert
Adams is to affirm life without lying
about it and then to behave in a chord
with our vision next in conclusion I
wish to touch upon how shifts in
technology can can force a change in how
one works
I was wedded to conventional photography
using film and chemistry and working
exclusively in black and white for over
20 years
remarkably late in 2015 I embraced color
and digital photography forced to do so
by dwindling supply of conventional film
and chemistry finally accepting the new
I set out to test my skills and start
where I had once been 25 years ago back
on the street and back with the magical
Leica this time a digital one the m9 and
I walked the streets of a village called
Minori and I’m showing you some pictures
this was my entry into color and it was
here on the streets of Minori that I
stumbled upon a rundown and neglected
photo studio where the germ of a new
idea was then sewn so a year and a half
later I went on to find 70 more Studios
around the country which gave birth to
my newest work title still lives so this
is in Jaipur so I found these old
studios that are all on the brink of
closing down this is Jaipur this is Bob
Nagar Gujarat and this was if you can go
back this was a model of Gandhi that was
a hundred years old because the studio
was a hundred years old and the grandson
who now runs print studio said in those
days children would come to sit
I Gandhi and get themselves photographed
and so I thought it was a very
interesting prop which is of course now
not used that much next this was in
Trivandrum a young Malala boy had come
in to be photographed for something and
I asked him if I could take a picture of
him and this is in my menorah studio
which was called Jagdish photo studio
and it was either so it was a lucky day
for me so the children were all coming
in and the parents and all really
beautifully dressed up and so I had a
very lucky day that day and got some
good pictures this is a village in
Orissa and this is also in Orissa where
the studio owner actually paints his
backdrops and now his trade is coming to
an end because he doesn’t have any
business so I would like to end with a
quote by Robert Adams again on why
people photograph when photograph when
photographers get beyond copying the
achievements of others or just repeating
their own first accidental successes
they learn that they do not know where
in the world they will find pictures so
if you had asked me while I was doing
portraits of Patel twins in the UK
whether I would photograph a Gujarati
speaking African tribe that came
centuries ago to India or whether I
would find 70 village photography
studios at the brink of change mirroring
my own brink of change I would never
even have remotely guessed thank you
[Applause]
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