[Leica] India report #3

["Robert Appleby" <laintal@hotmail.com>]

Ladies and gentlemen... I am very pleasant to be saying at this time, ek 
pura Dharavi report ready hai! But you are saying, why O why is this man 
writing-writing so many reports? Has he no job only? Just clicking-clicking 
all day, his wife and baby starving maybe, what does he care?
He is wanting to be photographer! Ha! With that small-small camera, flash 
nahi hai, just always saying "so natural-like light I am wanting", he is a 
fool or what!
Anyway, it's still raining hard most of the time, and my assistant Mahendra 
keeps forgetting to bring his umbrella, which means either I or the bag gets 
soaked. By now I'll need to grow new feet to get the dirt out. Today I was 
photographing in the rag-picker's area, a pretty poor part of the slum on 
the edge of a swampy area. Huge amounts of plastic bags come in every day in 
sacks, are washed, spread out to dry and then packed in sacks again for sale 
to recycling merchants. One gang of four boys handles around 500 kilos of 
plastic bags a day, earning around 100 rupees a head. Not bad, but not too 
good either. I met a lovely young girl, Manju, who had some acid thrown in 
her face accidentally playing when she was nine years old - the back of this 
area is basically an industrial tip - and has lost the sight in one eye. She 
was shy but happy to be photographed. Then on to another area, the edge of 
the pottery colony, to photograph a young boy being dressed and made up to 
be Krishna. Unfortunately the light was so poor that I had to use flash and 
the results will certainly not be too good, but after the dressing and make 
up session, he sat near the door with his dad drinking a cup of tea, which 
resulted - one rather hopes, what - in some nice snaps. Yes, it's terrible 
to admit, but I'm now a convert to natural light, although it would be handy 
to know enough about flash to use it with some subtlety.
I've also been photographing a lot around the dhobi area, where the 
washermen/women work. They're a friendly lot, washing clothes in black water 
that flows out of a ditch running alongside the railway tracks. Difficult to 
organise pictures in which twnety people are doing things all at once, but 
the results are not too bad. Today they were having a holiday to celebrate 
Krishna's birthday, so I just photographed them washing themselves, mostly 
kids in the same old oildrums they use for boiling up the clothes.
The railway tracks are a world in themselves, very interesting. I've been 
several times by now and it's a real buzz to photograph in a place like 
that, although the temptation to always have a train passing in the 
background has to be resisted. Sometimes they're in the foreground, which 
can be frightening! And you have to keep an eye out for the cops.
So, much the same as always, lots of nice snaps and a good time being had. 
But I look forward to a few rainless days before the end of this. So far the 
cameras have held up well, although I notice the lens mount is very far from 
water proof. The main problem is keeping the filter dry. With the amount of 
scrubbing it's getting, I wouldn't want to be without that protection.
Mild dysentery is also taking its toll, and I find myself groaning 
involuntarily from time to time as the cramps hit, which can freeze people's 
expressions in a portrait session like nothing else.
Rob.

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