A Fantastic State of Ruin

This book tells the story of the painted towns of Shekhawati in rural Rajasthan, India. For centuries, the painted buildings served the towns as trading houses, pleasure palaces, temples, caravansaries, and private homes. Following independence, the descendants of the merchant families left Shekhawati for India's burgeoning cities, abandoning their opulent structures. Some were left in the charge of caretakers; squatters took up residence in many; most simply remain vacant. The buildings have slowly deteriorated over time, ravaged by climate and neglect, and now lie scattered among the desert settlements as an elegiac collection of beautiful living ruins--a crumbling open-air gallery set amid the ordinary affairs of small town life. This book portrays the fascinating ruinous beauty of the painted towns, and, along the way, provides an intimate look at life and landscape on the arid fringes of Rajasthan. This world, too, is fading, and so the book's photographs, in the end, are a visual study of both place and society at the edge of time.
This book portrays the exquisite beauty that is found amid the ruins of a handful of tiny trading towns located along an ancient trade route in Rajasthan, India.
David Zurick received his PhD in Geography from the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center. He writes and photographs extensively about Asia and the Pacific, with a special focus on the contemporary cultural landscape.
David Zurick is an educator and a self-taught photographer who does in this cleverly done book (quite some pondering must have gone into arranging the photographs so felicitously) what I wish more photographers would do - he describes how, and into what mood, he was approaching what he came to photograph. --F-Stop Magazine