We're writing this from California! It's great to be back and eat all the delicious food. We have some photos from our last couple weeks in India; mostly of Delhi and the process of making our book.
Lauren explored the neighborhood of Shahpur Jat with our Swiss friend Samantha, who we met months ago in the ashram in Tamil Nadu. It was great to see her again and check out the abundant street graffiti!
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| Shahpur Jat |
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| Shahpur Jat |
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| Shahpur Jat |
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| Shahpur Jat |
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| Shahpur Jat |
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| Shahpur Jat |
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| Shahpur Jat |
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| Shahpur Jat |
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| GIANT CAT! Shahpur Jat |
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| Shahpur Jat |
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We also went to Humayan's Tomb with our French friend, Cédric (who loves squirrels). It's
the tomb of the Mughal Emperor Humayun, built in 1572 and recently
restored. It's enormous, with expansive grounds and beautifully
crumbling old buildings. Hamish climbed up a tree at one point and got stung on the earlobe by a wasp.
Later that night, we went to the Italian
Embassy with a group of French people from
our bed and breakfast place to watch France beat Nigeria. We all wore French flags on our cheeks. The
Italian Embassy in Delhi plays all the World Cup games on the big
screen, and serves excellent Italian food; thin crust pizza, risotto and
salads. We saw a few games there, and a few at this Lebanese
restaurant/bar which was good in terms of the halftime hummus but fell
down because of the distractingly loud Eastern European techno music
blaring from all corners.
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| Humayan's Tomb |
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| Humayan's Tomb |
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| Humayan's Tomb |
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| Humayan's Tomb |
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| Humayan's Tomb... similar to the gate to the Taj Mahal |
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| Humayan's Tomb |
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| Humayan's Tomb |
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| Humayan's Tomb |
On our last day in Delhi we headed to Old Delhi with our friend Piyush. The area houses the Jama Masjid, which is the largest mosque in India; we got caught in a massive monsoon while we were visiting! The area is also famous for its excellent non-veg restaurants, on account of all the Muslims there. We went out for lunch and had amazing tandoori chicken and mutton curry with a variety of Indian breads (we've been vegetarian since New Year's, but had attended a party a few nights before with an open bar and tons of meat, and broke our fast). Hamish ordered "brain curry" but unfortunately they were out of fresh brains. We didn't really fancy old brain curry.
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| The menu... no 24 |
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| Gas tandoor with fat roti bubbling inside |
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| Our last day on the streets of India |
After Old Delhi, we went to the National Gallery of Modern Art, which has a wide variety of Indian art on display. What struck us most was the tremendous quantity of different materials used. Hardly any oil on canvas; more inks on paper, silk, cardboard. Many different block printing methods, too. We liked a lot of the paintings, but weren't allowed to take pictures. Luckily the sculpture garden had interesting pieces too.
The most spectacular pieces were by Subodh Gupta, one of India's leading artists. He uses stainless steel pots and pans, everyday items used by every Indian family, as his material.
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| Everything Is Inside, Subodh Gupta |
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| Everything Is Inside, Subodh Gupta |
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| Dada, Subodh Gupta |
The strange thing was, even though the museum was huge and there was tons to see, we were the only people there! The power went out at one point and Piyush fell asleep in a chair, it was that quiet.
After, we went to Lodi Gardens, an enormous green park with tombs, a mosque, a lake, and architecture that dates back to the 15th century. It was very peaceful; lots of couples on benches and people power-walking with dogs. Apparently in Lodi Gardens, public displays of affection are more acceptable than they are on the street!
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| Lodi Gardens |
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| Lotus flower, Lodi Gardens |
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| Lodi Gardens also has the best trash cans we saw in India; all were painted really bright |
It was peaceful wandering around; there was tons of bird activity, unusual bird calls and feeding action. We saw a combined flock of pigeons and green parakeets mingling and eating and flying in a giant swoop of green and gray. The only bad thing was when we were followed/stalked by two men, extremely intent on talking to us. We had to resort to hiding.
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| Isn't this a good hiding place? |
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| No one here! |
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| Lodi Gardens |
We were glad to escape the intense Delhi heat and work on our prints at SV Photographic; recommended to us as the best photo shop in the city. They developed all of Hamish's film, scanned certain negatives with their Hasselblad scanner and printed all the photos.
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| SV |
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| The darkroom at SV Photographic |
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| Toweled enlargers |
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| Fresh out of the printer |
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| Ready for chopping up |
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| 5x7 prints; larger b&w prints were printed in the darkroom |
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| Titled, signed and laid out to dry |
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| The office: the double bed of our room |
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| Organising who gets which prints |
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| Piles 'o prints |
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| Notes to some of the lovely people who helped fund the project |
A few days before we left India, the books arrived. They came out better than we hoped, definitely worth the printing costs: we opted for Pragati Printers, who are reputed as India's best art book printer. This meant that the books cost us more than we had anticipated, stretching us to the limit of our budget. Thankfully, on the way back to L.A., the Lufthansa lady didn't charge us any excess baggage fees for our two extra suitcases crammed full of books!
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| Box of books... we had four of these. They were heavy. |
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| The cover! |
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| Marigold endpapers |
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| Sample spread; all the book's odd days are Hamish's black and white photos, and all the even days are Lauren's color photos. |
We'll write one more post of some of Hamish's black and white photos that didn't make it into the book, and then that'll be it for this blog. Thanks for reading!
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