On a trip to Benaras I decided to carry only my huge and heavy Pentax 67 with a load of b&w film. The plan was to focus on portraits with permission. This was way outside my comfort zone so I welcomed the challenge and looked forward to what could be some meaningful interactions. People in Benares’ like the rest of India, were quite happy to be photographed and some of the conversations included one with a sadhu (holy man) who had not seen his family for years. His son was now studying the US and after all these years he had spoken to him the just the night before. He was both proud and sad and we spoke at length about life and loved ones. Another sadhu who had a mesmerising face told me that he didn’t believe in God - strange but refreshing for a holy man I thought being a fellow atheist myself. He told me the only God is ones mother. Another entertaining conversation.

Anyway I thoroughly enjoyed shooting portraits and got better and more comfortable doing it as the week progressed. When I returned and developed all my film and saw the scans for the first time I was beyond pleased and decided that I had to showcase them in some sort of physical form. That is when the idea of a zine was born. My plan was to make the entire zine at home from printing to binding and so after some research on the internet I got the required supplies and got to work.

After a couple of failures and tweaks I was holding a lovely A4 zine in my hand. It was strong enough that I could hold it up with a single page and it still remained intact. The print quality was not professional by any standard and the zine could look more polished but I actually liked the raw feel of it and it was good enough to enjoy the images and maybe even offer for sale at a very reasonable price. And the best part is it got me to go through and make sense of all my images and sequence them and make prints that feel more satisfying than viewing images on a phone or computer screen.

The excitement of my new and successful endeavour led to the making of many more zines and even a dummy book that I will showcase over the course of the coming weeks. I am also thinking of doing a workshop on homemade budget zine making. If I can put this workshop together I know it will be very inapiring and a lot of fun for participants. Do let me know in the comments if you would be interested in attending such a workshop.

Anyway here is my homemade Facing Benaras zine. Hope you like it.