India In Her Eyes
Barbara Macklowe has a passion for photography and says it has taken over her life. After retiring from the family’s antiques gallery, she took several trips around the world, honing her picture-taking skills along the way. Self-taught, she learned by doing. She couldn’t put down her camera during two trips to India, one in 2004 and another in 2005, she said, and it changed her “forever.”
Before going digital, Ms. Macklowe carried up to 10 pounds of film on each trip, returning home with 6,500 undeveloped images. “I had a real connection with the people that I took images of. The children, they just won my heart.” Previously, she had mostly photographed flowers, which she captured in close-up detail.
She hadn’t envisioned turning her photography into a book, but, after showing some of the images from India to the head of the Papadakis publishing house, the nearly 300-page book came together in a matter of months. Released last November, “India In My Eyes” includes a foreword by Pritish Nandy, an Indian poet and writer. Passages from Rabindranath Tagore’s “Stray Birds” appear alongside many of the photos, some stretched across two pages.
“The book is about the way I saw India . . . the human connection and the beauty all around us,” she said.
Locally, the book is for sale at BookHampton, English Country Antiques, Marders, and Sylvester & Co. In New York, it’s available at Rizzoli Bookstore, the Asia Society, and the Rubin Museum. It sells for $70.