Anne Garde and Laure Vernière have been regular travellers to India for almost twenty years. Once a strange and exotic experience, India has now become a familiar landscape that draws them like migrant birds. India’s architecture, its palaces and monuments have given them many book opportunities but what really captured their hearts and imaginations is the spirit of the people. From rickshaw-wallahs to maharajas, the medley of people they have met is astounding. For Anne and Laure, crowded streets, village tea shops, the cocktail circuit or city art galleries have unwittingly offered them a many-layered culture that completely enchanted them. It is in the people that they found the essence of India. A place that seemingly reconciles a host of contradictions.

India offers itself generously to the traveller’s eye, and this offering can only overwhelm with its profusion of sensation, colour and smell. Which is why Anne opted to shoot black and white, so she is not devoured by the allure of colour that might numb her quest to see more, to delve beneath the layers and seek out the soul of the ‘real’ India.