Tempatation – The Conqueror at Konark Festival
[Gallery not found] At a glance of the 23rd Konark Festival, Orissa, with a classical performance, a captivated dance with live music.
Kartik Purnima
[Gallery not found] Kartik Purnima, Lord Kartik Puja in Puri, Orissa, India to mark the beginning of winter and the puja for the lord of protection.
Palace Hotels of Rajasthan in Traversing the Orient Magazine
In 2007, my photo book, Palace Hotels of Rajasthan, was published by Reise Know How Verlag in Germany. Tom Vater wrote the text. The book covers a wide range of heritage hotels with royal connections around Rajasthan, from modest but attractive mansions to gigantic palaces, from pure, sumptuous Raj nostalgia to bottomless kitsch.
The book came about after two trips around Rajasthan, in 2005 and 2006, for a series of magazine stories on the hotel businesses of India’s splendidly eccentric maharajas.
This month’s Traversing the Orient Magazine looks back at some of the most interesting properties we stayed at.
Tea Total in Darjeeling
“Life is chaos, the world is chaos. The only constant is change. I like chaos and the way you position yourself in it. Where do we come from? What are we doing here and where are we going? We need to answer these questions to be free, to find our way. That’s what I’m doing in my tea garden.”
Not the sort of introduction one would expect from a tea plantation owner in the Darjeeling hills. But then, Rajah Banerjee is not an ordinary man. He is the owner of the most highly prized tea plantation in the world. Makaibari Tea Estates in Darjeeling have developed sustainable, biodynamic agriculture at high returns. Rajah Banerjee, the enigmatic fourth heir to the estate, sells the world’s most expensive tealeaves. His main clients in the US, Japan, France and Germany buy up his entire harvest – before it is harvested.
View Aroon Thaewchatturat’s feature story on The World’s Most Expensive Tea, republished in Traversing the Orient Magazine in April 2009. Text by Tom Vater.
Asia Unique – Hands, Doors, Catch, Loads and Signs
Aroon Thaewchatturat has contributed to a number of photobooks in the series Asia Unique by Hans Kemp. Titles currently available are Hands, Doors and Catch. Aroon’s images are included in Hands and Doors. Each title runs to 200 pages, 16×13.4 cm, hardcover with jacket. Text in English. Price US$16.95
Available in all good bookshops and at Amazon.
Two more titles, Loads and Signs are in development, to be published 2010-2011.
Photobook – Panorama: Zur Quelle des Ganges
Zur Quelle des Ganges (The journey to the Source of the Ganges, Gaumukh) is my third photobook published by Reise Know How Verlag.
Published in June 2008.
Aroon Thaewchatturat contributes to second book on Ganges
Following the publication of her photobook on the source of the river Ganges, Aroon Thaewchatturat contributed more than 100 color and black/white images shot in 2007 in Uttaranchal, North India to “In Heiligen Hoehen“, a German non-fiction title on India’s holiest river in the 21st century, written by Tom Vater and published by Wiesenburg Verlag in March 2008.
If you’d like to read reviews or buy the book, please click on the image.
Photobook – Panorama: Rajasthans Palasthotels
Rajasthans Palasthotels, published by Reise Know How Verlag features thirty properties in the former princes’ state of India, and is my second photobook with this German travel publisher. It covers palaces, havelis and desert camps revamped as luxury accommodations.
Published in June 2007