Man Of The Moment

In his latest book, legendary photographer David Bailey captures the heart of Nagaland, and the dichotomy between its contentious past and hopeful future.

- Esha Mahajan

DAVID BAILEY DOESN’T INDULGE QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS PHOTOGRAPHY PROCESS OR TECHNIQUE. The camera, he says, is just an instrument—it’s what you do with it that counts. And at 79, he’s done a fair amount. His portraits of everyone from Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol to Twiggy and the Queen, his fashion campaigns for labels like Balenciaga, his famous exes, Jean Shrimpton and Catherine Deneauve, whom he married and later divorced, all put him in the same spotlight he shines on his subjects. But there’s another side to Bailey’s work, one that took him to photograph Mother Teresa’s home for the dying in Calcutta in the 1970s and recently to the remote parts of Nagaland.