Any American who travels to India returns with pictures of bright textiles and lush foliage that friends and family back home marvel at. The country is photogenic; you only need to point and click. Though I try to do more with my photography - to create symbols and tell stories through tight composition, to circumscribe vast space through traditional landscapes, and to help myself experience my surroundings visually and provide excuses for innumerable tangential excursions - I doubt that I succeed.
These images are all lo-tech transfers of film prints or slides from my first two trips to India in the summers of 1997 and 1998. (I may upload hi-tech transfers in the future.) The content of the photographs reflects the fact that I was working at various rural archaeological/art-historical tourist sites on a documentaries about children and compiling footage for short films dealing directly with tourism.
After those first two trips, I decided that that the process of picture-taking had too negative an impact on my experiences and interactions with the people and places I was photographing. The next trip, I did not bring a camera.
