Daily Street Life of Old Delhi

I am Abhishek Singh, a photographer from New Delhi, the capital of India. Driven by curiosity and wonder, my photography focuses on the ordinary interaction of people, their life, struggle, survival and their urban/rural environment. Exploring and documenting the human condition – one moment at a time. In my images, I try to blend out the noise of today’s increasingly fast-moving world and extract the beautiful moments of everyday life that often go unnoticed.

In my street photography project, I attempted to chronicle life cycles with a universal approach: noticing all parts of life working together as time passes us by. I started looking at the bigger picture in an even bigger way: I began to look at human life and activities.

At first, my perspective absorbed the daily routines of people living in old Delhi and various parts of the National Capital Region (NCR). Those involved in waste management, street hawking, roadside food vendors, the hustle and bustle of rush hours. From this, I began to see the sheer contrast in the design of Old Delhi and other parts of NCR itself.

Never before had I noticed such a beautiful homogenizing of kids, youth and aged as well as animals on the city streets, side-by-side going about their various daily routines without so much as a second glance. What seemed most intriguing was the vast similarity of the facial expressions of all of these people as well as animal kind could be. Nearly identical in instances of joy, sorrow, curiosity, anger and pain could be seen on the faces of these people that I had never even seen before, people I would likely never see ever again and understand their purpose behind their various expressions.

The most interesting part of my project was that it was able to come to life from seeing the different beings in the crowd for those short moments. I stopped when everyone moved around. I moved when everyone stopped. Through my lens, I could find hidden meanings of so many little things that we disregard each day. It was the significance of recovering our composure in our busy lives. In order to keep ourselves conscious of changes, we should be conscious of our surroundings first. This is the new definition of city life that I could derive from my photography project.

Sometimes, we get lost in the flurry of life. Things are born, things happen in between, and then things are gone. But how often is this all thought about as a whole? People either dwell on the past, enjoy the present, or plan relentlessly for the future.