White and Black: A Journey to the centre of Imperial Calcutta

Soumitra Das is a journalist born and based in Calcutta who began his career with The Statesman and is now with The Telegraph. He is deeply involved with the visual arts and heritage issues and writes regularly on these topics. He has a popular column titled ‘Flashback’ on Calcutta’s history and the city’s rapidly changing face. In October 2007, he brought out a book on the streets of Calcutta titled A Jaywalker’s Guide to Calcutta which became a bestseller. He has contributed to the Tramjatra book on Calcutta trams published by an Australian university.

Christopher Taylor is an English photographer based in France with the vision of a poet. His black-and-white photographs have an elegiac quality that sensitively capture the misty, grey climes of Iceland, the rarely-noticed details of China's bleak and dreary urbanscape, and the grand colonial buildings of Calcutta that had seen better days. A zoologist by training, this self-taught photographer mostly uses a cumbersome studio camera or else an ancient Rolliflex even in the busiest streets, and yet human beings are rarely sighted in his works. So, his photographs never fail to surprise. He has held critically-acclaimed exhibitions in Paris, Arles, London, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta.