A teenager in a red sari, holding up a smiling face to the first drops of a monsoon shower. Shot by Brian Brake at a south Kolkata rooftop in 1961, this photograph — one in a series on monsoon in India — made more than just headlines across the world. It catapulted the face of a young Aparna Sen, 16 at the time, to the photographic hall of fame. And it also inspired Steve McCurry, the American photojournalist, to document the moods and moments of the season.
Flipping through the pages of his latest book, India (Phaidon/Roli Books), at a Central Delhi bookstore, McCurry recalls how Brake’s photo-essay opened a whole new world for him: “I was only 11 when I saw those photos, and it made me think that I must experience this phenomenon. And that feeling of awe was alive even when I proposed a monsoon series to National Geographic , almost 20 years after I fell in love with Brake’s images in LIFE .”
The power of the rains — both nurturing and destructive — compelled the young Magnum photographer to dedicate more time to the project than planned. “It was one of my first trips to India, and I had to, quite literally, toss the official itinerary out of the window. One thing led to the next, and I found myself going everywhere,” he says.
The journey for the India series had started in Goa, on a sultry May afternoon. And before he knew it, McCurry found himself in coastal Gujarat, followed by Rajasthan. “In what seemed like the blink of an eye, I was shooting the vigorous Bagmati river in Nepal,” he says, adding that the unrelenting showers endowed him with a whole new set of survival skills. Learning to wade through neck-deep waters while trying to balance the camera overhead, for instance. “By the time I finished the project (lasting over a year across a dozen countries), I had learnt to respect this weather phenomenon as a life-changer, not the menace it may seem to someone with a Western eye,” he says. Getting soaked to the skin became a daily affair, something he seems to have enjoyed as much as running for cover during the dust storms that often preceded downpours. “I was new to the region, I didn’t speak any of the languages, I didn’t even look or dress like most of the subjects in my photos… But it was fun, more fun than even today with the internet, cell phones, bottled water, better toilets, bigger hotels and fast food chains,” he says.
McCurry, who is still lauded for the iconic portrait of an Afghan girl for a NatGeo cover, is quick to clarify that he is not against ‘modernisation’: “Who can be against development, progress? No one. It’s nice to have a horse-drawn carriage on a cobbled street as a subject for a photo, but would I even think of riding to the airport on horseback? But yes, the sense of adventure was far greater when I lived for months without the air-conditioner or struggled with having curry and rice at a roadside eatery. There was more poetry, more character in those years.”
The photographer found a soul companion in American novelist Paul Theroux, whose travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar left him smitten with the idea of capturing the railways in the subcontinent. Together they travelled by rail from Peshawar to Chittagong in 1984. Their journey resulted in The Imperial Way , a volume of stunning photographs and vivid prose. “It’s a privilege to work with a person whose creations have inspired you. Paul and I went on to work together on other assignments,” says McCurry. He also recalls how India, a country he has visited more than 70 times, made him switch to colour photography. More than 30 years after his first colour frame, McCurry is now open to the idea of photography on mobile phones. He dismisses the claim that phone cameras have made photography frivolous. “A good photograph involves an internal process… It doesn’t depend on the equipment. I am very active on Instagram. I keep taking photos with the mobile,” says the veteran, who was seen clicking away at the recently concluded edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival. What remain unchanged in the McCurry world are the ethics that govern photography. “There are no grey areas for a photojournalist. What’s there is there, and you cannot use tools like advanced software to misrepresent anything. The rules are different in other areas of photography, such as fashion, but not when you are covering topics like the abuse of domestic workers who come from Nepal and the Philippines,” he says.
McCurry’s latest series, for the 2016 Spring/Summer Collection of Valentino, took him to a Maasai village on the border between Kenya and Tanzania. “There were moments in that shoot that reminded me of my first days in India. And that includes a dust storm! Everyone thought it was time to wind up and run, but we kept shooting through it,” he says with a smile. That feeling of awe that McCurry spoke about is perhaps the initial stage of engagement with India. The perseverance — willingness to endure, through monsoon bursts and dust storms — comes later. As McCurry’s photographs show us, it is almost always worth it.