Alien Waters

The river.
The river is in the city’s margins. It is very dirty, filthy. The city does not need it any more. Its future is pre-configured, the river is ‘dead.’ It will now be cleaned but not like a life giving artery, but a sparkling necklace, adorning a new globality of the city. There was a time when the river was its ecology as the city and the river shaped each other. Now the relationship is only with land, which the river holds in its belly. Violent. Thousands of poor are thrown out, for the new stadiums, temples, bridges and pathways their futures uncertain. Death, the predominant Hindu relationship to life in the cycle of rebirth has a timeless resonance as ashes are immersed in the waters. But what will the rebirth be?

The self.
The self, seeking to recover a relationship in the new alienation as the river becomes a muse and metaphor for a search, within and without. The first bird I saw on the riverbank thirty years ago came back and changed my life as I attempted to regain a personal ecology as a photographer/activist. My organic body now extended by the inorganic body of the city. The river is alive, throbbing in my veins resonating unresolved questions of spirit and sense. The engagement with the triad of the self, the city and the river, becomes a reclamation of the self. I photograph even as I experience other human abandonment. I go back, again and again, endlessly, searching.