Far from the colourful clichés of an India as conventional as it is expected, Alexandre de Mortemart sets out, in the radicality of black and white, to depict the daily life of the capital of Bengal, of which he is a winter inhabitant. He has, here as in his work generally, that dark way of seeing the world: in a succession of snapshots he bears witness to an ordered chaos, in visual sobriety.

“He avoids the recurring cliché of poverty, and if we see wastelands filled with rubbish, emaciated dogs, silhouettes sleeping on a bench wrapped in gunny bags, waste pickers, he does not intend to provoke compassion, and even less to play on the magic of shimmering destitution. He does better: he confuses us.” — Pascal Bruckner