Robert D. Stephens is a Principal at RMA Architects, Mumbai. His passions include the art of building and constructing beauty through visual, literary, and cinematic imagery. In 2013 he co-produced a feature film with India's first You Tube star, Wilbur Sargunaraj, entitled "Simple Superstar".
The most unique feature of the photos is that they come with an index of the pollution levels in the city on the day that each picture was shot.
For this particular photo taken on April 2015below were the details of the pollution level:
SO2 - 14 ug / m3
NO2 - 18 ug / m3
RSPM - 85 ug / m3
"The total area of the city is 29.396 square miles. At the centre of the base of this rough semi-circle is For St. George. Its ancient military glory is largely departed, and though solid bastions still stand as reminder of more stirring times, the Fort today contains only a small detachment of troops. It provides, however, a home for the Secretariat of the Government of Madras, and thus remains the head-quarters of the Madras Presidency. Around the Fort is a belt of underpopulated territory most of which has been reserved the use of the military authorities, including on the south-west, the Island ??? a large gract of open land surrounded by two arms of the river Cooum, which runs through the city in a series of wide loops to enter the sea immediately to the south of Fort St. George. Immediately outside this zone, which surrounds the Fort and separates it from thecity proper, lie the most densely populated areas of Madras, and beyond those areas an outer semi-circular fringe of what may be roughly described as suburban areas. The irregular distribution of the city's population is largely accounted for by thefact that madras is made up of three or four distinct urban units and many little villages ??? the whole held loosely together by a web of communications which radiate from Fort St. George outwards towards the circumference with, of course, many intersecting roads and streets."
A City in Transition
Page 14-15
C.W. Ranson
1938
About Madras Transit
After the mesmerising aerial photos of Mumbai in "Mumbai Articles", Robert D Stephens turns his bird's eye view on Chennai in his latest collection "Madras Transit".
Click links below to see his other collections:
Mumbai Articles Mumbai NorthThis urban metropolis has had many admirers-from Lady Callcott, an English travel writer who spent considerable time in India, ("I do not know anything more striking than the first approach to Madras..."), to the Indian writer and cartographer, S Muthiah, famous for his political and historical writings on the "city that is still open to the skies, a city that in some ways seems a rural town that has just kept spreading."
Stephen's homage to Chennai, one of the top 52 must-see places to feature in The New York Times, includes 24 aerial photographs in colour. From the geometric street grids of Anna Nagar, to the banks of the Adyar River and beyond, each image is accompanied by a record of air pollution levels on the corresponding day, as measured by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board.
Our one-of-a-kind collection is a compelling invite to wander the streets of a city rapidly shrinking under the onslaught of globalisation.