Indian Faces

I recently received an email from Leica Camera promoting the Leica SL3 and featuring a collection of photographs of India by Steve McCurry. You can find the story and photographs here: SL3.

I have enormous respect for McCurry’s work. He is perhaps best known for his iconic portrait of the Afghan Girl, one of the most widely published photographs in the world. His powerful images of  fighting in Afghanistan also rank among the finest examples of conflict photography.

Leica’s email focused on the SL3’s outstanding colour capabilities, but it prompted me to think about my own photographs of India, taken during a three-week road trip through the country in 2015. That, in turn, sent me back into my photographic archive for a fresh look at a collection of images I hadn’t revisited for some time.

I’m still recovering from my total knee reconstruction, which has kept me away from the camera and out of the field. Fortunately, my extensive photo library has provided plenty of material for the blog. Far from being a limitation, this enforced pause has proved surprisingly rewarding. I’m rediscovering photographs I’d almost forgotten about, along with a few genuine gems that deserve another outing.

Inspired by McCurry’s Indian photographs, I opened my 2015 India folder and began reprocessing some of the original DNG (RAW) files using the latest version of Lightroom Classic. Almost all these photographs have appeared before on The Rolling Road and Macfilos, but I believe the new versions are noticeably better.

The advances in Lightroom over the past decade have been more impressive than I’d appreciated, particularly in the processing of RAW files. Returning to these images with fresh eyes, and with the benefit of today’s software, has revealed more detail, improved tonal control and a richer rendering of colour. It’s been a reminder that a photograph’s potential doesn’t necessarily end when the shutter is pressed—or even when the image is first published.

I’ve selected 20 photographs for this new series, which I’m calling Indian Faces. Almost all are portraits of people encountered along the way, and every image was taken with either the Leica X1 or the Leica X Vario.

By today’s standards, particularly when compared with the formidable, but weighty, Leica SL3, both cameras are decidedly vintage. Autofocusing on both is slow, and their sensors are modest by modern standards: 12 megapixels for the X1 and 16 megapixels for the X Vario. Yet both cameras have exceptional lenses that remain more than capable of producing beautiful images, even by today’s standards.

More importantly, they proved to be wonderful companions for photographing people and everyday life on the road. 

I’ll be publishing the 20 photographs in three instalments. It’s a chance to revisit a fascinating journey, rediscover some memorable encounters and see what a little modern processing can bring to photographs.