India for Le Monde d’Hermès
Sean Rocha has made a number of trips to India, beginning in 1992 with a journey through Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan in the north. More recently he went on assignment for Le Monde d’Hermès, traveling through Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south, and had an exhibition of his photographs in Bombay.
In Tamil Nadu, Sean went to a sand-swept town south of Chennai to photograph (and write about) a master of the veena, which is something like the sitar of the south; he then went on to the old French colonies of Pondicherry and Kairakal and the Danish enclave of Tranquebar, through the great Hindu temples at Tanjore and Madurai, and across the high range of the Western Ghats into Kerala.
In Kerala, a friend in Cochin had told him of a village puppeteer who lived on a remote hillside and was the last known practitioner of her art, which involved puppets perched on long sticks that she balanced on her upper lip. Sean set out to find her, driving to the end of a dirt road outside a village in central Kerala and then continuing on foot the rocky climb to her small home.
Click here to see the tear sheets of the music of Tamil Nadu article published in Le Monde d’Hermès in Spring 2008 and here to see the tear sheets of the Keralan puppetry article published in Le Monde d’Hermès in Fall 2008. Some outtakes from those assignments are below, along with a selection of photographs from other journeys in India.
Click on image to enlarge, then on the arrows to scroll through the gallery. To inquire about contract or stock rates click here.
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