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TEXTURES OF INDIA
India is a living paradox. In any one instant, I am both attracted and repulsed. I inhale sweet incense and acrid cow dung smoke simultaneously. I hear the haunting music of the sitar mingled with the call of the beggar woman. “Madame, please. Please, Madame. Chipati, chipati (bread, bread),” she pleads as she motions to a child hanging from a withered breast. The devout bathe in holy water while the bones of the dead burn upriver. Perhaps that is why I show you the beauty here, the texture, and mostly at close range. Perhaps pulling the lens back is too overwhelming. Rollover for more...
According to Webster’s, texture is something composed of closely interwoven elements, the essential part of substance; the disposition or manner of union. In short, it is the way things come together. It is primarily this texture that drew my eye during the month of my visit and allowed my western mind to reconcile what it was seeing.
Whatever harshness lives in India, it is balanced by the softness in the eyes of her people. Searing heat is met with cool stone. Severe dryness is countered by the lushness of the rice fields, the fullness of rivers. If I ever for a moment thought the landscape dull or barren, saturated colors met my eye. If I thought poverty and palaces or myth and reality could not coexist, I know now that they do. If I thought three gods in one were different from three million deities, I now see them as the same. Somehow there is balance. Somehow antiquity and modernity mix. There are cows walking with cars, and there is calm amid chaos. Dignity remains undiminished despite dire circumstance, and spirit is infused in every form of matter. This wild coming together is India.
While in India, I lived, breathed, witnessed and experienced an incorruptible integrity of beauty. Within it, lies an essential core quality with which we can all identify. We can rest comfortably there, be at peace. In any of its infinite forms, beauty remains that intangible language of the soul that we can almost touch, almost name, yet feel, somehow, that we know in our hearts. Beauty acts as a mirror, reflecting our own true nature back to us for study and contemplation, gratitude and praise, recognition and homecoming. It is from this place, with thanks and humility, that I offer these images.
Namaste
Photography Price List
5" X 7" -- $50
8" X 10" -- $75
11" X 14"/11" X 16" -- $150
16" X 20"/16" X 24" -- $275