Kolkata, 2012

If you want to know the feel of a place, you need to be on foot, on the street, off the beaten tourist path, and not part of a herd. It is not enough to see something of it through a window. You have to be where you can hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it. Step in it.

It was HOT! My intrepid travel companion, Randy Thompson, and I were in Bengal in early June, a few weeks before monsoon. It was the kind of hot that makes a cold beer taste so good, even to people who don’t usually like beer. Coming from Bangladesh where I could not get a beer (Muslim country), the first swig of a cold one the first day in Kolkata was ambrosia; I set the bottle down on a table and when I picked it up for the next taste, it was already too hot to drink. In temples and other spiritual sites you were expected to go barefoot out of respect, so we quickly danced across various hot paving stones until reaching the cool, soothing feel of marble.

It would have been so much easier to lie near-naked in a dark hotel room, lit only by the bright glowing around the window shutters, with a ceiling fan languidly pushing at the thick air. If you grew up in the American South pre-air conditioning, you know the drill. But much of the point of travel for me is to be surprised, and that’s unlikely to happen if cocooning.

I want to see what I might discover; discover in the sense of Christopher Columbus discovering North America. A lot of other people may already know, but it’s new to me. To capture detail and intimacy in narrative photographs of that journey, I like to use a wide angle lens and step into the scene. Here that let me see a fashion/style clash between the main subject-the women-that could be a metaphor for any number of social/political battles, and also include story-telling context like the bakery in the left background with goods in a modern deli case surrounded by a dirt storefront, the patchwork of architecture, and scary nightmare of wiring.

My new web gallery, Kolkata: On the Street, 2012, https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000gmGmlDXTr4Y, is a series of photographs from street level that tell some stories of the “feel” I got for Kolkata and countryside.