$35.00
To Reach the Source: The Stepwells of India is a photography book about a unique and magnificent architectural form that remains unknown to most people outside (and even within) India.
Size: 9″ x 11″ Landscape ISBN: 978-1-961856-34-9 Binding: Hardbound Pages: 120pp Publication Date: Fall 2024 World Rights: Available
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“A stepwell renders the water’s many meanings manifest, immanent, palpable; the space encourages us to become mindful of the essential, sacred nature of water, even though this life force or energy is not personified or named. It provides a kind of darshan, the moment when a Hindu devotee experiences a connection with the divine and comes to feel blessed.”
November 2022
8.5" x 11" portrait
More than just a shaft dug into the earth to fetch water, these are entire buildings that descend several stories below ground; they are spaces to be entered and occupied, serving functional, social, and ritual purposes. Often, they are as monumental and ornate as a church, and this is intentional. They are a source of water, a gathering space, and a temple all at once, but instead of rising into the sky, they descend below the surface. They create a spatial experience unlike any other, in which one is below ground but remains connected to the sun and sky. Today they lie largely abandoned and overlooked, in various states of preservation or, more often, disrepair.
The photographs seek to recreate the striking ambiance that they elicit. The brief text that follows the images (interspersed with a few architectural drawings) provides a necessary minimum of context, ultimately to reinforce the primarily visual nature of the reader’s experience, one in which the photographs have priority. The photographs seek to give readers some sense of the meditative process of descending into these beautiful structures, of going away from the surface on which we live, but not being cut off from it, instead directed towards the very source of life.
Claudio Cambon has worked as a photographer for more than 30 years, and on the Indian Subcontinent for more than 25 of them. He has worked, exhibited, published, taught, and lectured across the world. He is currently residing in France.
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