BENGALURU: Mumbai has been the answer to a lot of dreams, and Belgian photographer Max Pinckers, it turned out to be a place of nirvana when he found the people of this city as his muse for his first book on India, The Fourth Wall in 2012.
Pinckers was in the city to talk about his love for photography and his work in India at Bangalore International Centre, Domlur.
Pinckers says he finds Indians kind towards people who work for art.
“As a photographer, I find India a friendly place to work because people here, in my experience, love to be photographed. At all the places I have worked, people have had their apprehension towards being photographed, but here, it’s different,” he says.
Pinckers recalls his first visit to India was with his mother when he was nine years old. He says he was too young to understand the connection he had with this country but soon, it became his favourite place.
Till now, the photographer from Brussels has come out with two books on India – The Fourth Wall (2012) and Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty (2014).
The first one revolves around life in Mumbai, while the second one is about the idea of romance in the 21st century.
“I find it quite fascinating about how Bollywood actually influences the life of a Mumbaikar,” says Pinckers, who confesses that he has not watched many Bollywood movies.
Being a professional photographer for 10 years, he likes to capture “critically constructed moments”, which are raw and real. While growing up, Pinckers never wanted to be a photographer.
“When I was studying art at Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, group artists from different disciplines came together to come up with a project where I was the photographer. Since then, I have never stopped clicking pictures,” says 32-year-old Pinckers, who later pursued Masters in photography from the same academy and is now a photographer, researcher and publisher.
Of the many awards he has received for his work, the last one was Leica Oskar Barnack Award for his series Red Ink, which was made in 2017 in North Korea for The New Yorker magazine.