Tiane Doan na Champassak - Kolkata - 2014

Edition of 500 copies.

"August, 1943. Night is falling on Calcutta, silencing its flocks of ravens, but wakening another kind of life – a feverish, hidden one: in the Maidan, that open space at the city’s heart, there are shadows waiting."

This extraordinary story has its beginnings in Calcutta, the starting point for his mission to Chungking. In the first chapter he gives a vivid description of the ex-capital of British India just four years before independence. Having travelled frequently to India since 1996 it never occurred the photographer that Kolkata (formerly the anglicised name Calcutta) would inspire him to produce a body of work focused on its street life a. In fact it is in the streets of Kolkata that I find the most absolute representation of Indian reality. It is also the only city which holds such an intense concentration of extremes; quiet and loud, rich and poor, clean and dirty, modern and old, beautiful and ugly, past and present. This continuous duality has become the photographers leitmotiv.