We love the idea of tropical ruins, vestiges of an older world kept alive in the cherished husks of 1950s automobiles and non-gentrified colonial structures, of late. Some of our greatest writers regularly extol, now, the beauty of great cities from the more tattered days of their youth. Much of our art is about seeing beauty in chaos, about finding some salvation in the decline and fall of a civilization.
Fionn Reilly’s new photo book, Kolkata Calcutta — which will be celebrated at a December 9 afternoon book launch party at the Center for Photography at Woodstock complete with author Tony Fletcher interviewing his fellow Londoner about the work he’s just written an intro for — takes a long-awaited close glimpse at the much-maligned Indian city known more for its destitution, its Mother Theresa-year, than its being a birthplace of its nation’s greatest cultural gifts to the world.
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