Raghu Rai Local commuters at Churchgate railway station. Mumbai, India. 1995.
“I was shooting in Mumbai city for a book project in 1996. I had heard of local trains arriving into the city with a human delu
(...) ge that was unmeasurable, a flood of people who would then be dispersed to their places of work. Sure enough, I reached Churchgate railway station–the busiest place in the heart of the city–at 8 a.m. I stood there in awe and amazement, with an unimaginable and overpowering feeling of the deluge. It took less than a minute for thousands of commuters to disappear. The platform was empty again until 3 or 4 minutes later, when more trains arrived to bring in another deluge.
More than the crowds, I wanted to capture so many human bodies melting into each other and disappearing in a mad rush to get to their respective places of work. So I put my camera on a 5 foot-high switch box almost in the middle of the space between two tracks and exposed it at one-eighth of a second in order to capture the deluge. But those sitting on the benches reading the morning newspaper or waiting for someone remained still. This expression is visible anytime of the day in most metropolitan cities in India.”
- Raghu Rai © Raghu Rai | Magnum Photos
