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 May 2015 below were the details of the pollution level:
SO2 - 16 ug / m3
NO2 - 19 ug / m3
RSPM - 47 ug / m3
"In 1871 Madras had plenty of room for expansion within the limits of the municipal boundaries, and large areas of what was technically the 'town of Madras' must have presented an entirely rural appearance. In the possession of these extensive and largely undeveloped tracts Madras has enjoyed a great advantage over other Indian cities such as Calcutta or Bombay (especially Bombay) where the obstacles to lateral extension have forced a vertical rather than horizontal development. Until comparatively recently, Madras could be accurately described as a one-storied city, and if its immense distances created transport problems,they at least delivered the city from 'sky-scaling' tendences and the huddled dreariness of the Bombay 'chawl'."
A City in Transition
Page 47
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.