India, Intro: A Visual Circus

Here is a little backstory to my three week trip to India: I traveled with five of my dearest friends from childhood.  We went to the same elementary school and I've known them since second grade, when I arrived on the scene with purple coulats and tangled hair. It is an inexplicable feeling, to love people so deeply for more than two decades. In celebration of this, and of all turning thirty, we set off by plane, train, rickshaw and taxi to Delhi, Agra, Varanasi, Jaipur, Kerela and Chennai. We sweated and got sick and laughed the entire way. The photo above is the Parthasarathy temple in Chennai, and it pretty much sums up how overwhelmed I felt. At a certain point, I had to pick a few organizing principles for what I was going to look at and photograph. I still question my approach, to seek order and patterns in the chaos. But over the next few weeks I'll be sharing inspiring finds I managed to unearth from the heap.