by Jason Elias Travels in India with Photographer Steve McCurry
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It all began early last year when my good friend Tom Niccum and I had been talking. Tom and I were both aspiring amateur photographers, we had both been reading Robert Young Pelton’s “World’s Most Dangerous Places” and somehow we had got it in our tiny squirrel minds to take an adventure-photography trip to some crazy part of the world where we’d never been. Little did we know that from the seeds of that idea we would end up hosting a trip lead by world famous National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry to the heart of India on what many of the attendees would describe as the greatest photo trip they had ever been on.
Tom and I had met the year before on an America Photo Trek to Illinois (one of the contest trips where you had to submit a portfolio to be invited) and we had hit it off due to the fact we both loved travel, photography and fatty foods. Since then we had been emailing back and forth – he from the wilds of Eagan, Minnesota and me from the wilds of Venice, CA – and somehow we had become fixated on hitting the legendary Pushkar Camel Fair. The Pushkar Camel Fair happens once a year in Rajasthan, India (a few hundred miles west of New Delhi) and is exactly that – a huge, wild, teetering camel trading fair.
Over 50,000 camels travel from all over India to the sand dunes surrounding the tiny holy town of Pushkar where traders haggle, buying and selling camels for over a week. Tiny Pushkar Lake, around which the city is built, also happens to be one of the most holy spots in Hinduism (so holy that Ghandi’s ashes were scattered there) and late November - the same time as the Fair - also happens to be the exact date that it is most auspicious to bathe in Lake Pushkar’s waters. So during the Fair, gurus, Sadhus and all-around holy people from all over India take pilgrimage to tiny Pushkar to dip in its waters.
Pilgrim
PHOTO: Andy Martin 2002
And since the city elders of Pushkar ain’t stupid they figured they’d turn the entire week into a festival and so they throw an Arts and Crafts Festival where every craftsman for hundreds of miles comes and sets up shop to sell baubles and bangles, saris and slippers. And finally, as the ice cream in that root beer, five or six of the loudest wandering circuses in all of India show up to parade their freaks and geeks for the week (and American Circuses don’t have anything on these…).
Since Tom knew Steve McCurry, we somehow secured Steve as a photographic leader for our trip (as a fallback, I had already been combing every Olan Mills in the nation just so we could say we had a “working” photographer to lead the tour). For Steve the idea of returning to the country he loves so much leading a group of experienced and ready to learn students really appealed to him (and also said quite a bit about what a great guy he is). Then, once securing Steve as a leader, we were able to get a small sponsor for the trip – Crumpler Camera Bags. I had seen Crumpler at a camera expo and loved them so much I had contacted them, trying to figure out a way to get one of their bags for free. They had turned out to be really cool and had supplied free Crumpler bags for everyone on the trip.
And so on November 17th of last year I packed my sturdy Crumpler bag, locked the door to my place at 4am and met Tom at the Northwest lounge LAX (he was in L.A. at the time). Our journey would be from LAX to Minneapolis and from there to Amsterdam and then on to Delh
Delhi
PHOTO: Jason Elias 2002
Upon arrival we met up with our seven paying students and Steve McCurry. The trip was long and brutal and both Tom and I had anxiety attacks aboard our flights (28 hours of travel can lead to that) for different reasons – Tom stressing because of the fact we two who had never done anything like this, were flying halfway around the world to lead a group of paying students who entrusted their time, money and safety to us two jamooks, while I hyper-ventilated because on our flight from Amsterdam to Delhi (we had transferred to KLM Airlines) I sat amongst a group of well-meaning Dutch who tried to convince me it was WAY too dangerous for Americans to be traveling to this part of the world right now - part of our itinerary would take us to Jodhpur, roughly 70 miles from the Pakistani border and we would be traveling a portion of the trip on the Grand Trunk Road, which ran from Delhi to Kabul. But on the other side of cool, our KLM flight path that night at one point had Afghanistan on the left side of the plane, Iraq on the right and I could look down on the night-lights of Tehran.
Arriving in Delhi late at night, the three of us (we had picked up a student – Denny – in Amsterdam) were met by an in-country guide. There I received my first schooling in Indian rupees when I tipped well over 10 bucks for a guy to take my bags from a cart and put them in the back of the van. Driving from the airport, and being amazed by the smog levels in Delhi, we also had our first taste of Indian driving. I thought at that time I had seen the worst driving in the world in Mexico, but it didn’t hold a candle to India. The swerving, the accelerating and the huge holes in the road plus the constant use of what is referred to as the Indian brake pedal – the horn – were just an aperitif to the near-death, adrenalin-surging driving we would have later in the trip. That night though, thankfully, we made it to the Siddarth Hotel in Delhi and proceeded to crash hard.
Over the next two days, while acclimatizing ourselves and sleeping off our jet-lag, we traveled around Delhi, seeing the sights. Delhi was a caterwauling, coughing, cacophonous city where there seemed to be no traffic regulations and was crowded to the point of being completely overwhelming.
Women reflect at Indian gate.
PHOTO: Jason Elias 2002
There was no spot of land that didn’t have someone sitting, sleeping or standing in it and as far as I could tell, the only point of the entire day was to somehow dodge the constantly honking scooters, bicycle rickshaws and little Suzuki cars jostling through the city. It was loud, stinking and completely off the charts in what any of us were used to. And still the city amazed us. We climbed the towers at the Jama Masjid, an ancient mosque built by Shah Jahan, the same cat who built the Taj Mahal.
Prayers at Jama Mahsid.
PHOTO: Jason Elias 2002
We crawled the dark back alleys of the sprawling bazaar, the Chandni Chowk. We visited ancient monuments and extravagant Hindu temple where Tom got his head dabbed like a true follower and where one of my trusty Nikons bounced off the marble steps like some sort of super ball, but kept right on working.
Whilst in Delhi we also picked up the majority of our group: Mike from L.A., Ben from Colorado, David from Kentucky, Andy from Oregon, and crazy Attila from NYC. We had one more, Paulina from Mexico, who was to meet us in Jodhpur in a few days. And we all waited in anticipation for Steve McCurry. Steve finally arrived late the last night in Delhi and we all had an intro dinner with him. Tom knew him well but I had never met him. I don’t know if I was expecting him to dispense some sort of pearly wisdom on the history of photography or to immediately transmogrify my vision of the world but neither happened because that wasn’t Steve. Under the khaki Yankees cap he was just a cool cat who ordered Kingfishers with dinner. Little did I know that was one of the first lessons?
Traveling with other photographers, I had noticed the assumption that we as photographers all fall prey to every so often - the idea of the more expensive the equipment, the better the shot, the more techno-film-jabber spoken, the more knowledge you have. But over the course of the trip that was one of the biggest lessons to be learned from Steve. To be sure, you had to know the technical stuff - aperture, film stock, exposure and shutter speed - but it was about much more. In all of the shooting Steve has ever done, he only carries two old Nikon bodies over his shoulder and a couple of lenses. Not even a camera bag. For Steve, it was about seeing what was really there and becoming part of it. About enjoying what you were doing. It was about the vision, not the photo
