Amanda Harlech: Travelling in India

Travelling in India is Amanda Harlech’s photographic record of her travels from Delhi to Mumbai. This is not documentary photography, but rather an elegant suite of confessional impressions—of people, landscapes, markets, temples, colors and textures. The book gives shape to aesthetic and emotional responses that resist definition, and suggests, in Harlech’s words, “the vibrancy and improvised genius of India, alive with prescience, disquiet, grace and yearning.”

"This album is a photographic gesture. It is in the spirit of those intrepid British travel writers like Lady Stanhope who used words and a sketchbook to record their impressions. I don’t think you can ever capture or explain India, but during my three weeks exploring a fraction of this multifarious, miraculous country I discovered a world as vivid and refined, as complicated and intensely colored as an eighteenth-century Mughal miniature. Here was the shifting animation of life itself, the celebration of humanity and the longing of the soul for the divine in every small act of kindness. Every day is a festival, every day is a death."