Humans of India
In 2012 I had the pleasure of traveling around the most amazing country in the world: incredible India. Expectations were high and, probably for the first time in my traveling life, I was not a bit disappointed at the end of the journey. I know it might sound a little bit too much to say it is "the most amazing country in the world", but I also know whoever as been there will understand these words. I was told that India was "very photogenic" and I understood it completely at first glance. I could see the depth in the eyes of almost every Indian person, woman, man or child. It is difficult to describe how deep they look at people. Another thing that impressed me, as a photographer, was the colours that surrounded every situation: it was not easy to take B/W pictures in India, because the colours were so alive... It was the mixture in between the culture, the architecture, the colours, the smell, the light (not the one that comes from the Sun) and the high contrast that Indian society provides to the Westerner's eye that made this travel the most extreme travel of all time so far.
BUDDHISM. These pictures were taken in Bodhgaya (the place where Siddharta Gautama got enlightened) during the Kagyu Molam.
THE KIDS. There is also something funny about the kids: kids in India have the particularity of making you loving them or hating them to the extreme, no middle point.
THE WOMEN. There is something special in the women: they are the silent voices, I didn't hear a woman's voice in the streets in two months traveling. Paradoxically, they are the ones who work the most and whose efforts support the country's subsistence. Besides, they are the human beings that give India its true colour.
THE TRAINS. The nurture of every traveler in India. A place to observe, a place to grow up.
VARANASI. On the first picture you can see the sunrise from the Ganga. On the second one, an Indian man has a sacred and very personal bath after the glorious hour in the mother river.
I wanted to leave this image for the ending, as a closure of a process I had to experience in India. The thing that collapsed me the most was the situation women are captured in. These human beings have lost all their value and it's a lesson of honesty and compassion the way they try, not only to fit in, but to do their best. Their voices are silent, their actions too; but no one can not see them: they are the light of the country, a collective soul awakening from everlasting colours. When I looked at their eyes I could glimpse the significance of the message they instinctively throw to me, and here is the one I throw to you all.
