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 May 2015 below were the details of the pollution level:
SO2 - 14 ug / m3
NO2 - 18 ug / m3
RSPM - 35 ug / m3
"Elihu Yale's name is best known in the present day in connection with Yale College in America. In gratitude for munificent donations towards its endowment , the authorities called the institution after him. Elihu came out to India as a young man, drawing a salary of five pounds a year as Writer in 1672. When he stepped into power he was a seasoned Anglo-Indian, having been already fifteen years in the country....
The chief event during Yale's governorship was the foundation of the Madras Corporation with a Mayor and Aldermen. Child had pushed it on with persistence, believing that it was the only solution to thedifficult question of the town conservancy. He even went so far as to send out the maces and swords without waiting to hear whether the Corporation had been successfully formed, and gave orders for the making of gorgeous robes of office."
Fort St. George Madras
Page 108-110
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.