Setting the clock

In the holy town of Pushkar, amidst the dust and heat and magic of a festival, I fell in love with photography. Wandering by tents and caravans, the images I shot triggered strange thoughts. The timeless scenes haunted me. I had no sense of the century. Everything that existed could have existed anytime in the last few hundred years. My first film – a 36 roll of black and white – framed the experience. Sometime later, in Agra, I wanted to photograph the Yamuna river. By chance, I took a picture. A boy had been playing in the water. He was standing in the river, directly below me. As he started to move, I noticed the water around him began to ripple. The result fired my imagination. The boy was fixed, while the ripples, circling, became ever bigger. They were like the rings of a tree. As if the circle of life was emanating from this little boy, surrounding him in details of his life to come. The strong circles close to his body: his youth. The larger more gradual circles: his adulthood. Finally the wider, increased circles – ghosts of their former selves – his old age: slowly returning to the stillness of the river that is life.

That picture is the hub of this book; its focus, time and its passage. Timelessness. Life, existence, and our habits, which repeat. The Hindu belief Samsara means the constant cycle of death and rebirth. A cycle that repeats: within a cycle of seasons, within the cycle of repetition. That is the cycle of life. So I started to consider the death and rebirth of a day. Whether we lived in the 17th century or the 21st, we share timeless habits. We wake, eat, sleep; live, dream, die. Perhaps a (ceaseless) stretched day was the idea. And, maybe, the journey to find that day would be a story in itself. All caught, captured by a device which freezes time: in a format that has a timeless quality. An analogue camera. Taking black and white film.