Chapel Sancta Maria de Olivo – until November 30
The words of the artist: “I am not a photographer, a profession that cannot be improvised. I am a printing worker and programmer analyst, but since childhood, I have been practicing photography, which has become my best form of expression. I am a portraitist and find pleasure in photographing only during encounters on trips, such as those undertaken in Pushkar.
A village in Rajasthan, a state in Northern India, where twelve thousand inhabitants live. It is a sacred place of Hinduism and there stands the only temple in the world dedicated to Brahma, the Creator God.
Every year, two simultaneous events, a pilgrimage and a camel fair, draw between 250,000 and 300,000 people in the autumn. The rest of the year, Pushkar becomes a village once more, only animated by Western tourists haunting the bazaar or Indian pilgrims on Full Moon days.
Between October 2006 and February 2010, I made seven visits there, in all seasons, exclusively in the village and its immediate surroundings, totaling a year of living on site, which is a third of my time over those three years.
Each stay allowed me to immerse myself more and more in this microcosm; the preparation for this trip—geographical, historical, linguistic—helped me, but the connections made from the very first of the seven stays were the true gift of this journey, many people opened their doors and much more to me.
Like in archaeological work where, layer by layer, one recognizes the history more and more deeply, I acquired, stay after stay, an ever more ardent, fine, intimate knowledge of the place where I lived. Until they allowed me to freely capture their daily life, in its natural state, and revealed to my lens the extraordinary moments of their ordinary lives. Without this complicity, I would never have been able to produce this work, perceive this magic, this beauty of everyday life, and render it in my images, intact in the brightness of their gazes…”
