I am finally on the road for ENEMIES again. This time I am on my way to Kashmir via Dharamsala India. My goal in Kashmir is to photograph people from both sides of the conflict there which has been going on since India and Pakistan gained independence from Great Britain. Kashmir is predominantly Muslim and India is predominantly Hindu. That is the basis of the conflict.
Flying on the cheap, I arrived in Delhi after four flights. After my flights in the US I had a redeye flight from Newark to Munich, a 9 hour layover in Munich and then a redeye to New Delhi, India. I got into Delhi at 7 am to find that one of my bags didn’t arrive. So glad I arrived in the morning – I spent a few hours in the airport then went to my hotel and spent a few more hours buying some new clothes and such. I had another day to kill in Delhi so I hired a rickshaw and poked around old Delhi a bit. Here are a few images…
I was wondering what India would feel like after my trip to Africa. Crowded, intense, a sea of humanity, the smell of spices – enough to make you choke in some places, hidden emotions, scam artists, poverty, wealth, disparity. Differences and similarities.
The iconic sacred cow 
Hindu priest on street in Delhi 
Me and Rameesh the rickshaw driver 
Jain temple 
Old Delhi 
Spice Market, Old Delhi 
Bored guard in the Red Fort
About some of these images… I got an iphone and I’m experimenting with the different apps you can get for photo-processing on the iphone. I know what you are thinking – I’m an artist, and i shouldn’t be using apps like that. Why? This is becoming a way for huge numbers of people to create and express in a format that was never possible before. That alone makes it interesting. The art world is exploding beyond the boundaries of fine art in ways that Andy Warhol and Glenn Gould predicted decades ago. I think this social/art experiment is amazing and fascinating. I’m also starting to experiment with taking photographs with lower tech, much smaller equipment. One of the things I’m experiementing with on this trip is a small portable sports camera. This is a shot from the dark spice market in old Delhi taken with that camera. I could take a much cleaner, beautiful photograph with my expensive slr, but I like the feeling of this.
After a day in Delhi I caught an overnight bus to Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile. That will be my next post.