Impressions of Rajasthan Hardcover,2003

Rajasthan is India’s tradition-rich northwest royal province, home of maharajas, of imposing forts and grand palaces, and 3,000 year-old settlements. So it is also a land rich in street color, popular pageantry and a unique ethnic design language. Impressions of Rajasthan takes photography lovers across one of the most inspirational regions on the Indian subcontinent, offering a unique look at the painted imagination of India with murals of pure pattern, mandalic abstractions and figurative story-panels. It is a rich, distinct decorative tradition-often as humorous as it is pious-woven into everyday visual life.

Morandi’s camera also masterfully captures the everyday lifestyle of contemporary Rajasthan, in particular, Rajasthani women who are the carriers of this pattern language tradition: chatting in small groups, buying fruit at the market, and painting their homes with murals in which religion, history, and politics are described in a brushstroke.