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 2015below were the details of the pollution level:
SO2 - 13 ug / m3
NO2 - 19 ug / m3
RSPM - 31 ug / m3
"An old engraving now hanging in the museum of Fort St. George in Madras depicts an early landing there of a group of British traders. The square riggers in which they have arrived are anchored far off the sandy beach, and the passengers have been transferred to rowboats, two of which are having trouble with the surf. An Indian woman, with a baby astride her hip, gravely watches the landing. A group of Indian fishermen sit on their own tiny boats made of hollowed logs (like the boats that Madras fishermen still use skillfully in the same surf). From one rowboat, several Britishers in waistcoats, cutaway coats, and highblack silk hats are wading to shore, unhappily lifting their trousers in the vain hope of keeping them dry. A lady in a long dress with ruffles, a feathered hat on her head and a parasol in her hand, is being carried over the waves by two coolies, naked except for their loincloths and the rich brown of their skins. Nothing could more vividly suggest how alien to the land were the newcomers - two cultures meeting in the midst of salt spray."
India - A World in Transition
Page 53
Beatrice Pitney Lamb
1963
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.