four from Benares
If you follow my Twitter feed you may have noticed me kvetching just a little bit about the city of Varanasi, also known as Benares. (just as an aside, most cities here seem to have at least two names. In some cases it’s one of the awkward legacies of the Raj [Calcutta/Kolkata, Bangalore/Bengaluru], but in the case of Varanasi [or, variously, Benares, Benaras or Kashi] it seems to have more to do with a mispronounciation that happened probably a thousand years before there was a Britain. But I digress.)
Despite the heat and the complicated name and the veritable sea of scam artists along the holy river, I managed to take some pictures. Here are four of them. (and by the way, those are birds in the first frame, not dust on the sensor. Except for the one piece of dust on the sensor; that’s dust on the sensor.)
This trip has made me think a lot about the difference between being a photographer, a journalist and a photojournalist. I’d go into more detail here, but there have been too many words on this thing lately, and not enough pictures, so I won’t. Buy me a beer and ask me about it. It’ll be more interesting that way anyway.