Mumbai Street Portraits
Mumbai Casual Laborers
While a new Indian middle class enjoys the fruits of a recent economic revolution, there remain those who make their living by providing simple services on the streets for a few rupees. One can get a shave and haircut on almost any street corner in India for 30 rs. (about 40 cents). There are plenty of cobblers, earwax cleaners, fortune-tellers, shoe shiners, umbrella fixers, bicycle mechanics, tire repairmen, pan vendors, as well as legions of small street stalls selling every imaginable item at rock bottom prices. These vendors in this informal street economy endure heat, dust, and police harassment as they sell their services and wares in makeshift stalls or hard fought patches of sidewalk, and often spend their nights sleeping in the same places. These casual laborers still make up a large part of India’s economy, but they are ignored by the legions of pedestrians, until the bargains they offer are just too good to pass up, and then a sudden evening crowd gathers, jostling for space, fingering the goods, and driving hard bargains that enable the vendor to eat another day. I focused on the people I met on the street in a series of large format black and white portraits I undertook on a trip to Mumbai in the summer of 2008.
