Robert D. Stephens is a Principal at RMA Architects, Mumbai. His passions include the art of building and constructing beauty through visual, literary, and cinematic imagery. In 2013 he co-produced a feature film with India's first You Tube star, Wilbur Sargunaraj, entitled "Simple Superstar".
The most unique feature of the photos is that they come with an index of the pollution levels in the city on the day that each picture was shot.
For this particular photo taken on April 2015 below were the details of the pollution level:
SO2 - 18 ug / m3
NO2 - 24 ug / m3
RSPM - 90 ug / m3
"A piece of land along the shore, a mile broad and six miles in length. It had nothing apparently to commend it. It was devoid of beauty of scenery; it had no harbour, although there was good anchorage in its roads. It was nothing but a dreary waste of sand, on which a monotonous sea broke in a double line of surf, giving it an inhospitable look, which is retains to this presentday. A shallow lagoon-like river, running parallel with the sea for a short distance, formed the protection needed on the land side from predatory tribes of horsemen; but otherwise the river was useless. It afforded no shelter for ships; and its brackish waters were of no use for irrigation purposes. It often emitted an unpleasant and unhealthy effluvia from the rotting seaweed lying in its loathsome black ooze. The river, confined to narrower limits int the present day, with some of its mud bands reclaimed, is scoffingly dubbed "The Silvery Cooum."
To atone for its defects, it has a trick of assuming in the tropical sunset a fascinating beauty and fairness. Its smooth waters reflect the gorgeous colours of the sky; the blue smoke of the wood fires in the native huts spreads an aetherial azure haze over the palms and banyan trees on is banks, and the eye of the artist is equally delight as his nostril is offended when he gazes across its broad bosom. When the sky is purple with the gathering clouds of the monsoon, the Cooum ruffles its waters into a sheet of silvery grey ripples, and it gleams in its setting of dark green like a polished mirror of steel; even the black wet ooze glistens with delicate shades of pearl."
Fort St. George Madras
Page 9
Mrs. Frank Penny
1900
About Madras Transit
After the mesmerising aerial photos of Mumbai in "Mumbai Articles", Robert D Stephens turns his bird's eye view on Chennai in his latest collection "Madras Transit".
Click links below to see his other collections:
Mumbai Articles Mumbai NorthThis urban metropolis has had many admirers-from Lady Callcott, an English travel writer who spent considerable time in India, ("I do not know anything more striking than the first approach to Madras..."), to the Indian writer and cartographer, S Muthiah, famous for his political and historical writings on the "city that is still open to the skies, a city that in some ways seems a rural town that has just kept spreading."
Stephen's homage to Chennai, one of the top 52 must-see places to feature in The New York Times, includes 24 aerial photographs in colour. From the geometric street grids of Anna Nagar, to the banks of the Adyar River and beyond, each image is accompanied by a record of air pollution levels on the corresponding day, as measured by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board.
Our one-of-a-kind collection is a compelling invite to wander the streets of a city rapidly shrinking under the onslaught of globalisation.