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+Portfolio
Home
Love you forever
Cause Street
Varanasi
Bombay
Kushti
No Swimming
Dubai Migrant
Rewha Society
The Oscar Foundation
Greenland
Muay Thai
Swim Here
New York
Iceland
Dance
Happines
Instagram
Shop
About
Contact
Bombay.
4 trips in 3 years working on projects in and around Mumbai. In every visit taking time to document the life of its inhabitants and the everlasting chaos of the city.
It is really is like visiting another planet.
Jesus is kept safe on the cross from the torrential Monsoon rains by carefully wrapping him in plastic. This particular Jesus is located in the Bandra area of Mumbai.
Bandra is a predominantly Christian, middle class, neighbourhood and one can find these deities all over the area for people to stop by for a quick prayer or a sacrificial offering of flowers.
Getting a haircut and a shave is one of the most enjoyable things one can do in Mumbai.
Every place is different but most of them have a various selection of face massages, cleanings, soakings, warmings, coolings and.. well all kinds. Its seriously amazing, and usually very entertaining to see all the tricks and machinery the barber pulls up to finish the task.
A wheat miller from a slum called Dharavi, At 2.2sq. kilometers it is home to an estimated one million people, making it one of the most densely populated area on earth.
A sign-painter stands in front of one of his masterpieces. In India, many of the bigger signs and advertisement are hand painted on walls or HUGE panels like this.
Mumbai is home to 45.000 yellow taxis, a far cry from the 60.000 it had only a few years ago. The main reason is the rise of app based rides like Uber. The tourists of South Mumbai are far happier not to haggle for overpriced rides from the gents in the brown uniforms.
I love the aesthetics of the yellow cab, they are usually decorated in laminated colourful floral
patterns often with religious iconography hanging from the mirror and a plastic incapsulated
Ganesha glued to the dashboard to keep one safe in the madness that is the Mumbai Traffic.
Waiting "patiently" outside the stations in North-Mumbai are the rickshaw drivers, some are dirt cheap with the meter running but some are smart and try to lure in ignorant tourists with an offer and/or stack a bunch of people into a shared ride that is only a little bit cheaper but much more profitable.
An Icelandic friend of mine I met in Mumbai on my first trip, gave me quite a few pointers on how to survive the madness of the city. One was as follows:
"Regarding the traffic and crossing the street, you really just have to go for it. Even if the cars are coming. They do see you and its just a game of chicken. Just go in a straight line and at a constant speed. Do not expect anyone to see you at the side of the road and stop and let you pass. Just go! Althoughh... There is one major exception. Don’t, DO NOT, walk in front of the busses! They will run you over!!"
And now, after some experience living in the city and coming back to it a few times. Yes, I agree.
Don’t mess with the busses. They will kill you.
Shot at the huge and quite beautiful victorian railway station in central Mumbai called by the unpronounceable name of "Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus" or "CST" for short. The terminal used to be called "Victoria terminus" by the British colonists who build it but it got changed by the BJP party in one of its many efforts to wash India clean of its colonial history.
It is estimated that around 20 million people travel with the railway system every day.
I cant understate how mammoth the Indian Railway system is, I am also in utter amazement on just how it can function, day in and day out with these ancient trains. It is by far my favourite place to photograph the daily life in the city. It is estimated that around 20 million people travel with the Mumbai railway system every day.
Thats 70times my nation, in one city, moved around, every single day.
Dhobi Ghat.
A well known open air laundromat. The washers, locally known as Dhobis, work in the open air, standing in rows of concrete wash pens, each fitted with its own flogging stone. To wash the clothes from Mumbai's hotels and hospitals. Around 3-5000 people live and work there all year round.
The washing is done by hand in these giant pools on a flogging stone in the middle. The workers have to stand all day, in the detergent filled water. Exposing their skin to the harsh chemicals.
The water is heated by a system of pipes that run through open flames inside old oil drums, producing a huge amount of poisonous smoke that the workers have to breathe in.
The workers actually both work, and live there. This little girl lives with her family on a bed amongst the fire and the smoke.
And this girl lives on the rooftop with her family, sleeping on the thin mattress behind her.
Mumbai, is a crazy bustling city filled with an everlasting chaos. There is always someone going somewhere, with something on their backs, live animals walking in your path and a carhorn screaming in your ear from every direction. But then there is is Chai, there is always a moment for chai.
I did a series of portraits of "Men at work" in the city
Men at a metal plate and bowl factory, the men polish the metal plates with heavy machines that spew microscopic particles of aluminium into the air, that they then breathe. Its easy to assume that lung disease are extremely common in this trade
Dotted alongside the train-tracks all around the city are these makeshift houses. It is estimated that around 60% of the people that live in Mumbai, live in slums like these.
One of the oldest, and by far the biggest is the Dharavi Slum. A 2.2sq km area accommodates more than one million people. Dating back to the colonial era it was founded in 1884 to provide the colonialists with workers in their factories. Many generations of people have since then lived in this tightly packed community.
Animals running free and eating trash, is a very common sight.
Mumbai is notoriously dirty, trash gets thrown sometimes straight out the window into riverbeds and on the roadside. The monsoon then flushes it away into the sea, so a recent estimate shows that India is responsible 80% of the plastic in the oceans. As of 2018 the Government of Maharashtra, the state that Mumbai resides in, banned all disposable plastic to fight this problem.
This is a very common sight in food production, live animals inside cages or on the floor, picked up and slaughtered right there and then with out any regard to their wellbeing or sanitary conditions.
Kamathipura.
Asia’s second largest red-light district. Often generations of prostitutes living and working together at the same place, in a government crackdown the number of sex-workers dramatically decreased from an estimated 30.000 to a mere 1500. What I found interesting is the family dynamic of the whole thing, kids playing around. Grandmothers cooking and taking care of the the children while the mother and daughter did the work.
A man stands next to a likeness of Ganesh at the start of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival.
The festival starts on the 13th of September and celebrates the Hindu God Ganesh, the son of Shiva. Ganesh has got an elephants head and 4 hands. During the days, Hindus walk with the likeness of him onto the beach and lower him in the sea, along with a bunch of flowers and candles. That is for every Hindu household (that can afford it), all over India, a plastic or ceramic statues of him are submerged into the ocean waves and then litter the beaches for the next few weeks.
Woman vehemently slams on her huge drum along with around 2-300 others to celebrate the start of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival. I love these moments in Mumbai, when you are just on your way to the store and you turn the corner and there is a huge celebrations with drummers and statues all over the place, people singing and dancing and enjoying life.
Religious festivities
In India, religion is very important and so comes the celebrations, there is always some festival going on somewhere. Having the largest Hindu, and the second largest Muslim communities in the world, along with a huge christian and Buddist community. Festivities are in no short supply.
This is a very common sight in Mumbai, being so extremely over populated, housing is un-afordable for the regular villager that comes to the city in search of work.