PixelatedImage Blog

January 2007, Nizzamudin, Delhi, INDIA

This is one of the first images I shot in what has come to be my favourite countries. India is, simply, an astonishing place.

This is the shrine at Nizzamudin, a Suffi place of worship and one of the more magical places I’ve ever been. It’s a place where you can easily lose time and space and truly forget when and where you are. I was there with Matt Brandon – another first – and as he led me into this space I watched him speak with vendors and stall-keepers in his fluent Urdu, feeling very much like an outsider. So I put my camera to my face and quietly shot what came to me, feeling like I didn’t belong and hoping that hiding behind the camera would make me invisible.

This image, two men drinking chai adjacent to the shrine, sat in my archives for well over a year before I re-discovered it – a witness to the fact that images don’t always say the same things, sometimes they resonate only after they’ve sat with us for a while. Sometimes our expectations of what images we “should” have captured get in the way of truly seeing the ones we did capture. This is that image for me.

And now, a couple trips to India later, this image more and more captures that time and place like none of my others. It captures for me the relationships, the gender roles, the way people take time to drink chai and talk and just “be.” It captures the agelessness of a place completely obsolesced by the modern world, and my longing to be in such a time and place where people slow down and move a little slower. It also pokes at my sense of injustice over the role of women in the majority world; reminds me of African women doing laundry or making meals while men sit lazily in the shade and talk the day away. Makes me uncomfortable, throws me emotionally off-kilter as I place myself on the floor beside those men and feel her presence there behind me. Makes me feel guilty, unable to enjoy my chai. Reminds me that while I’d left Canada thousands of miles to the west, I’d never really left my own culture. And maybe she had nothing at all to do with those men, though her proximity suggests otherwise. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but still even that is revealing. This photograph probably implies as much about me as it does them.

We stayed an hour or so, it felt like a day. We ate mutton on saffron rice at a first floor restaurant on the way out – one of the best meals of my life, I can still taste the mutton on my fingers and hear the din of the street below (should wash my hands and get my ears checked) Longing to return. Only 145 days.

Exif: EOS5D, ISO 800, 1/3200, f/2.0, 135/2.0 L lens. No idea why my ISO was so high. It’d been dark in the arcades and alleys, I was probably distracted.