An eye for the city

The photographer visited places within the confines of the Island city on foot, including Kamatipura, Parel, Chowpatty and Dharavi. Pics courtesy/Tara Books

While recovering from a ligament tear in 2016, Mayur Tekchandaney began taking walks in his neighbourhood - on the fence of Khar and Bandra - along with his camera. Having lived in Mumbai for most of his life, the designer surprisingly found himself making new discoveries. His first observation was how one could explore the city through colour, and immediately the idea of putting together a photobook that acts as a prism for the city - refracting a VIBGYOR theme - dawned on him. But what materialised, in the form of Still Bombay (Tara Books), a photobook that was released this week, is not just an examination of Mumbai's colour, but also character. That stemmed from his second observation.

Tekchandaney's journey of photographing nooks and corners of the city on foot spanned close to 1,000 kilometres. He felt like a tourist, rediscovering his own hometown. "Bandra has villages like Ranwar, Chimbai and Chuim, which have pathways on narrow roads; I was able to find new pathways to go in and out of them. Then, I've never gone all the way to [Khar] Danda - normally, you just walk through Bandstand and Carter Road, and don't take the gullies - and when I was walking through the koliwada, I would see a small beach that I had never known earlier," he explains.

Reading through Tekchandaney's book is an experience similar to that of his rediscoveries. In every frame - be it an image of the Kanchanjunga Apartments on Peddar Road or a tiny, rugged stairway in Byculla - there is a sense of quiet and calm in what is essentially a chaotic city; it's as if every person and object, and the surroundings they inhabited the moment the photographer clicked the shutter, froze in reality - still. And although its name may have changed, for Tekchandaney, the city he grew up in is still Bombay. Both these factors influenced the title.

With a bank of approximately 18,000 photographs, Tekchandaney wanted to build a narrative to the photobook. So, he wrote 14 essays - some personal narratives and the others touching on broader ideas like inequality. The process of laying the book out also required reading literature about the city including architect and urban planner late Kamu Iyer's Boombay. "I was trying to capture the mood of the city. The book is an emotional portrait, not a city guide. So I mapped it as a personal journey - starting with nostalgic memories of parts I grew up in and then proceeding to discover what the real Mumbai is, and questioning existing ideas," he adds.

In this book, he has stuck to the confines of the Island city - from Mahim creek to Sion in the east to Navy Nagar in the south. "Now my intention is to walk the rest of Mumbai; just before the lockdown, I had already started walking in Chembur and Vile Parle. I don't know if that will be a follow-up to this book but it'll definitely be a book."