The Pushkar Scrapbook

Since a long time I wanted to create a story about the Pushkar camel fair, one of the biggest known. From afar what I heard and read about this world of camel traders resembled a tale like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. However, when I arrived in Pushkar, I saw hordes of tourists and other fellow photographers who were trying to take photos in an athmosphere of a human zoo. The camel traders would shout at you "Bakshish! - Give money!" before you would rise your camera. This was the first time I felt to this extent how we photographers can spoil the place, and it was sad that I was taking part in all of it. Indeed, many photographers facing the resistance of the locals were trying to use extremely long lenses to still grab some exotic portraits. What I felt was that the totally authentic people, the camel traders, were getting more and more deprived of their athmosphere, which was no longer theirs. Then I decided that I only take portraits of people fully aware of me being in front of them, only do it with a normal portrait lens from a close distance, with the full eye contact, and finally, that these should be camel traders who would not ask me for money. And the athmosphere I would reconstruct in a form of a scrapbook, where I gather all visually important signs of the place where I was staying. This was how The Pushkar Scrapbook came to life.