Sounds of the Soil

Sounds of the Soil is a journey through the poetic Rajasthan region of India by photographer Dustin Aksland. The following images were shot during the first leg of a three week trip – a seven-day road adventure through Rajasthan. Aksland hired a driver and visited the towns of Jaipur, Mandawa, Bikaner, Jaiselmer, Jodhpur, Ranakpur and Udaipur.

Six photos in the series were shot while they camped for three nights in the Thar desert near the village of Jamba. While there, he recalls, “local and traveling musicians, dancers, snake charmers etc. would arrive in our three person camp and perform for us. Some of them became friends and spent the entire three days with us.” After Rajasthan, Dustin headed to Agra, Varanasi, Mumbai and Goa. “I photographed in all of these cities, but when I returned home and began editing, the photos I made in Rajasthan stood out and I began to see a loose theme emerging – individuals working this unforgiving land, and entertainers roaming the desert with their songs of love, separation, heroism and revelry.”

The photographs are on exhibit until September 3rd at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. This is the fourth exhibition in a project called Crtl+P, Photography Taken Offline, which the gallery began in January of 2011. Crtl+P is inspired by photographs that the Edelman Gallery sees online and presents offline on the walls of their gallery.

Dustin is currently residing in New York. His photographs have been exhibited in Brussels, Copenhagen, New York City, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. His next project, he says, is “going back to India soon and photographing a series on a grass roots motorcycle racing scene”. To view more of Dustin’s work, visit his website.