Stuart Freedman in Delhi

Wednesday January 19th, 2011

WM photographer Stuart Freedman divides his time between England and India. His frequent travels to India bring him to Delhi, where he works on a wide range of photographic projects, encompassing everything from commercial to charitable work. The uniting thread is an examination of the culture of this enormous city, which on the one hand suffers from poverty and pollution, but on the other hand can claim a remarkable diversity and history.

“For the last few years,” Stuart said, “I have been trying to image Delhi in a different way.” Since 1996, he has tackled a few different projects based in Delhi that explore its public spaces. The gardens, for example, left behind by Mughal emperors and the colonial English represent an unusual space in a city that seems fully urban, as Stuart describes in a fascinating essay.

But a study of public spaces also leads to the streets. Last year Stuart started a project about mental health, “specifically the effects of urbanisation on people coming to the city and losing connections to traditional ‘Indian’ society,” and he has now teamed up with a global anti-poverty agency called ActionAid to expand on the project. He worked with “a pioneering psychiatrist doing street therapy for the homeless”—there are about 15,000 homeless people in Delhi, more than one percent of the city, and many of them struggle with mental illness, a problem that the city is not equipped to deal with. Along these lines, Stuart produced a series of images both of the street and of medical institutions.

However, some of Stuart’s work addresses markedly different subjects. He has done quite a tour of the coffee houses of New Delhi, spaces much like European cafes. “India’s cafes speak of a moment in time,” Stuart writes, “an era of romantic, Ghandian intellectual Socialism that too has almost been eclipsed by the coming of the Market and ‘India Shining’.”

-Asad