Rajasthan, Gujarat, Ladakh and Kol-
kata are extraordinary spots that I
keep wanting to return to.
One of the aspects of India
you focus on is the monsoon.
How do you translate some-
thing so massive like that into
a cohesive story?
I researched what was the fundamen-
tal meaning of the monsoon and how
it affected people’s lives. The monsoon
is an important part of the Indian cul-
ture. Often, it is either too much rain,
resulting in flooding, or not enough
rain, resulting in drought and poor
crops. In either case, it creates devas-
tating results. It is a dramatic situation,
and sometimes can be life-threatening
for thousands of people.
Having lived through two mon-
soons I understood I would need to
travel to areas with extreme weather
conditions in order to tell the story.
During and after the monsoon,
there were very interesting festivals.
Take the city of Varanasi. People
have to cope with flooded streets,
sometimes using boats to com-
mute and adjust their lifestyle with
the weather.
My first encounter with the mon-
soon was through the pictures of
Brian Brake, published in LIFE
magazine in 1962. I was inspired,
and I wanted to go to these places as
a 12-year-old boy. I decided when I
got older to see these places myself.
That is what I did 20 years later and
spent two years in India.In addition to the reportage
work you’ve done in the region,
you’ve produced many powerful
portraits of locals often working
in open shade and with a shal-
low depth of field.
I'm using the selective focusing,
and I'm selecting what I want the
viewer to focus on. Besides the
technical and the composition, the
most important thing is the human
aspect, and telling a story through
the empathy that you feel for theperson you are photographing. I
like the fact that a photo tells some-
thing about what it is like to be the
person that I photograph.What camera equipment are you
working with these days?
I'm currently shooting with the
Nikon D850 and limit myself to
two lenses—the 28-70mm and
28-300mm zooms—and the Has-
selblad H6D-100c with the XCD
120mm Macro and the 45mm. The
Hasselblad allows me to make large
prints. I typically do not spend too
much time on settings and dedicate
most of my time to the situations and
the people I'm encountering.Some of those situations and
people have been in war zones.
How did you go about trying to
convey the horror of 9/11, which
happened so close to home?
The attacks on September 11th happened
in my neighborhood in New York. I live
about a 30-minute walk from there.Scotland, 2016