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 June 2015 below were the details of the pollution level:
SO2 - 13 ug / m3
NO2 - 19 ug / m3
RSPM - 31 ug / m3
"Madras is well said to be 'a city of magnificent distances.' Not only are the roads long, but the private drives up to the housesare a considerable length. The Mowbray Road, running parallel with the old Mount Road, is bordered with some fine banyans. The branches interlace overhead and form a long aisle of wood and foliage. It is beautiful in all its aspects: in the earlymorning, when the mist is rising and the blue smoke of the wood-fires hangs like a curtain of delicate gauze over the still vegetation ; in the broad rays of the noonday sun, when every leaf glistens with reflected sunlight; at sunset, when horizontal shafts of gold pierce the western side of the road and touch the grey stems of the trees; and even at night, when the full moon throws a lacework of patterns upon the roadway. The road ends abruptly at the entrance to the grounds of the Adyar Club, losing itself in the crossway called Chamier's Road.
The compound of the Adyar Club slopes down to the Adyar River ??? one of those smooth, still backwaters, like the Cooum, that begins as a watercourse, and spreads out into broad reaches. Itis a natural boundary to the suburbs of Madras on the south, and is unpolluted by drainage."
On the Coromandel Coast
Page 67-68
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.