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 February 2015 below were the details of the pollution level:
SO2 - 21 ug / m3
NO2 - 28 ug / m3
RSPM - 68 ug / m3
"The dust of Madras rises from the laterite, a ferruginous earth of which the roads are made. The laterite is beaten down withwater, and binds into a hard, smooth surface that is very pleasant to drive over. The constant wear of cart-wheels and the pounding of hoofs, equine and bovine, reduces it in time to the finest powder, so fine that it resembles an ochre paint of venetian red tint ready ground for mixing. It permeates everything, and penetrates through clothing to the very skin. It stains white material with which it comes in contact, just as powdered paint would stain it. Walking over such dust is impossible for a lady who would wear light garments and keep them spotless. As for the smells, they are indescribable."
On the Coromandel Coast
Page 61-62
Mrs. F.E. Penny
1908
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.