With a name like Preston Merchant, and with the sort of work he does, documenting the farflung Indian diaspora, you’d have expected him to be a good Parsi boy. No, he says, he isn’t. (He’s good, but he isn’t Parsi.) In which case, his interest and diligence is all the more remarkable. Preston is also a blogger for SAJA, but what I most admire is the breadth of his work: Shah Rukh Khan watches the snow fall from a billboard above the street in Jackson Heights; Phagwah is being celebrated by Caribbean Indians in Richmond Hill, New York; shipworkers sit in dingy holds inside MSV Shree Mahalaxmi, docked at the port in Sharjah; a wedding takes place connecting Houston and Chennai; there are details of domestic lives in Kenya and South Africa; you see Indian workers in a sugar refinery in Guyana, and gold merchants in Dubai; young Indian women put on make-up for Miss Teen India pageant in Georgia, and desi gay men sweat it out on the dance floor in a nightclub in Manhattan. What is it that unites these photographs? For the most part, you’d think it is the color of the skin of the folks portrayed in them. But that’s not all. It is more the colors that Preston finds to put into his frames that tell a unique story of the movement of peoples. Take a look at the picture above of a township in Durban. The massed clouds, the windblown, overgrown grass. The only piece of stillness comes from those homes in the distance, their simplicity underscored by the play of those somewhat unfamiliar, even unIndian, colors. In every picture in the series, no clash of civilizations, only the clash of colors. The paint on a boat, white silk worn by the bride’s father, brocade on a sari, a debutante’s dark lipstick, and often, many times, wherever people have gone in search of a better future, the changing hue of the sky.

Image top: Phoenix, South Africa. Image below: Houston, Texas.

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