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By David Samuel Robbins.
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Photographs by David Samuel Robbins
128 pp., 70+ color illustrations, 14x12".
Photographer David Robbins has made a career of wandering and photographing unique places around the world, working for magazines like the New York Times Sunday Magazine and National Geographic Traveller, as well as leading workshops for photography students in countries as diverse as Jordan, India, Myanmar, Bhutan, Morocco, and Nepal. His new self-published book, INDIA: Fragments from the Constellation, is a 3-year compilation of street photographs made in India. These images represent the culmination of a career spent exploring the world’s cultures in search of new experiences and opportunities for making pictures. |
INDIA: Fragments From the Constellation. By David Samuel Robbins. |
Robbins is a photographer’s photographer, meaning his ideas are the result of a rigorous engagement with the camera and visual experience rather than working from a preconceived conceptual framework. His pictures radiate light, color, and precision, and are executed with flawless technique and understanding of the medium. The book itself is beautifully produced — amply sized, with an embossed black linen cover depicting a constellation or cosmology of sorts, an ouroboros in the middle (a snake consuming its own tail), and the four corners containing Tamil (a language native to parts of Southern India) inscriptions, translated as birth, death, creation, and destruction.
The book is divided into three basic sections. The bulk of it is a portfolio, full of large photographs documenting the best of Robbins’s engagement with India. The pictures are full of twists and turns. Robbins takes us to familiar destinations only to show their unlikely corners — imagine a grimy room, housing statues of Hindu deities and kings, one charging an iPad on its lap, and a beautiful look into a day in the life of a turmeric grinder. Towards the back are two small chapters — or perhaps better characterized as appendices — identified as “Side Projects.” Each of these sections — “The Idol Makers of Kumartuli” and “Kushti: The Ancient Art of Indian Wrestling” — offers a small selection of photographs with a brief description of the project. The first of these, “The Idol Makers of Kumartuli,” takes a quick look at a district northwest of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) populated by potters and artisans dedicated to making elaborate sculptures of Hindu deities and mythology. The section of Kushti, a form of Indian wrestling, looks at men dedicated to learning the discipline of the sport.
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| INDIA: Fragments From the Constellation. By David Samuel Robbins. |
Any kind of genre photography is characterized by its own visual vocabularies. Street photography requires a spontaneous engagement with the flow of life, an acute sensitivity to be in the “right” place, and the lack of compunction to put the camera in the middle of it. Travel photography, on the other hand, is characterized by a different set of mythologies grounded in genuine wanderlust and romantic dreams. It requires the determination to hike to remote temples and a willingness to emerge oneself in foreign customs and experiences. A closer look makes it clear that the distinctions between street and travel are as murky as any; Robert Frank pioneered them both in London, Peru and even The Americans. Robbins’s approach offers a similar hybrid, giving us a colorful look at India, full of a genuine love for the region and mixed with surprising grit, humor, and insight. Within his layers is a history full of complexity, conflict, and hope.
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Brian Arnold is a photographer and writer based in Ithaca, NY, where he works as an Indonesian language translator for the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University. He has published two books on photography, Alternate Processes in Photography: Technique, History, and Creative Potential (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Identity Crisis: Reflections on Public and Private and Life in Contemporary Javanese Photography (Afterhours Books/Johnson Museum of Art, 2017). Brian has two more books due for release in 2021, A History of Photography in Indonesia: Essays on Photography from the Colonial Era to the Digital Age (Afterhours Books) and From Out of Darkness (Catfish Books).
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| INDIA: Fragments From the Constellation. By David Samuel Robbins. |
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| INDIA: Fragments From the Constellation. By David Samuel Robbins. |
