When I was a little girl, I used to wait for the postman at the gate. I was waiting for news from my parents, traveling around Asia.
The letters used to come in beautiful paper, with descriptions of decorated camels and elephants, passing by carrying mysterious passengers, wrapped in turbans and multicolored veils.
Almost 40 years later, I went to India to get some of these images from my past. Memories of what I had never lived.
I arrived in New Delhi at dawn. At sunrise, I woke up in a world completely different from the bucolic universe my imagination built: "Welcome to India, madam", said the very thin driver of the rickshaw, who rode the winding streets of chaotic traffic.
Before the trip, I removed a filter from my Canon 5D to capture light radiation from what we see. And with the camera modified, I began my research, my personal investigation, into that intimate India, this imagined place.
I could finally find then in the small villages of Rajasthan; There, with the infrared filter, I began to capture scenes from my childhood dreams. Gradually, India that I photographed from the present was approaching India from my dream past. And the records — photographs of faded colors in shades of white, blue, and yellow — increasingly resembled the illustrations of Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism's foremost sacred scriptures.
In the holy city of Vrindavan on the banks of the Yamuna River, where Krishna would have lived his childhood and youth, I photographed a divine boatman who transported people from this world to the next. In Varanasi, land of saints, a diver appeared in my frame just as I was setting up my camera on the banks of the Ganges. It was the imponderable in action. The magic acting on photography.