Take a culture that’s rich beyond most Western beliefs.  Splice it with pop art, graphics, add some dada and that’s what Pop India aims to deliver.  Images drenched in colour, style, mood, neither traditional nor modern, with a disregard of the documentary and a healthy disrespect for right or wrong. 

The project is all about the image.  Not a message, not a pretty sentiment, just playful images that at the end of the day are only photographs. 

The project will be based in the Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, Western India.   This is an area rich in tradition, tribally diverse and geographically unique, as well as isolated.  People still wear and make wonderful clothes and these clothes reflect the area and their ancestors, being big on detail, texture and meaning.  Traditional crafts still flourish, from block printing, to pottery, to embroidery, to batiks, all the way to ship building.  The Rann is a vast salt plain.  Hostile to most life and mutating from dried-out salt plains in the winter to a virtual island in the summer monsoon.   

Using local materials, such as tika, posters, walls, block prints, henna, we aim to create unique environs that can be used as portrait settings.  We plan to use these materials in a pop art fashion for example, a block print of an Indian goddess printed numerous times on a blue painted wall.  This wall could then be used as a background to take traditional dressed people, but encouraged to pose in a fashion magazine style.  The variations are endless. 

India is everything.  And everything will be reproduced in our photographs.