"My father and uncle were imprisoned for life. They fought in the 1984 riots in India, in response to the attack on the Golden Temple.”


Manjit was the first person I encountered in the market this morning. His English was decent but I had trouble understanding his conversation in parts. He told me about living in Punjab, where he is originally from, and the terrible history of riots and massacres involving his people. I have to admit I didn’t know much about the history of India from this decade, but having read up on the 1984 riots, it seems there was quite a lot of wrong doing on the governments part.

Anyway, Manjit was very friendly and even offered to show me round Punjab when I was next there as he spends a good few months there every year. I bid him farewell and managed to take a few more portraits later in the morning and then met up with MrJohn at the White Cloth.

We stopped off in the Corn Exchange, MrJohn had a roll of film to finish and wanted to take a portrait of Tom in the West Yorkshire Cameras store. I ended up buying an old Kodak Vest Pocket. Considering it was from the 1920’s, it was in remarkably good condition. The only issue being that the film it uses, 127, is no longer in production so MrJohn is kindly helping me put some traditional 35mm onto a roll which’ll fit and use it that way.

After some much deserved lunch we took a stroll to a film processing place to pick up some prints and see if anything had come out for the film he had recovered from an old camera. Unfortunately it wasn’t that clear, the film had degraded a lot in it’s 50+ year history but there may be some hope in recovering some detail in digital so wait and see what miracle MrJohn can pull off :{

There was more walking, and more portrait taking. We met some people I had photographed before, and we met Rima who had messaged me a long ago (asking me to stop her if I ever saw her) and I would never have thought I would ever meet her, but coincidentally I did. We had some final fun, taking portraits of her before heading home.


Humans of Leeds