Blessed mistakes

In November 2018, I travelled to India and Nepal carrying several cameras and many rolls of Ilford HP5. It was the first trip I had undertaken using only analogue equipment and, like any beginner, I made countless mistakes.

A few days before travelling, I visited an exhibition of Gabriel Cualladó’s work that had a profound effect on me. His high-contrast photographs, dense with deep blacks, made such an impression on me that I wanted to emulate that aesthetic during my trip. In my complete ignorance, I thought the best way to achieve it was to underexpose the film at the moment of exposure. I even shot as much as two stops below what my camera’s light meter indicated, producing appalling results in many of the photographs.

I also made mistakes during development, which caused the dark circular marks visible in this photographic series. They are nothing more than the bubbles created by the chemicals when agitating the tank containing the film.

Sometimes we are unaware of just how important it is to make mistakes. Those mistakes, and that journey, marked a turning point in my relationship with photography and, above all, with India.

Leaving Elephanta Island behind. Mumbai, November 2018.