In photographs: Rebirth at the water's edge – a journey into India's stepwells

Almost everywhere in the world, the built environment meets the water with a hard, almost defensive edge, even in a city like Venice.

But the Indian subcontinent has a wonderfully open relationship with water.

In India, at any ghat, we see steps that meet the water, descend beneath it and let it wash over them. This does not feel like a boundary, rather a fluid meeting point where our clearly defined world encounters and intermingles with a more mysterious and formless state. Architecture becomes amphibian.

India’s stepwells reflect this open relationship.

In most places in the world, a well is a relatively narrow shaft in the ground through which water is drawn up to the surface.

A stepwell is instead far more than just a conduit: it is a space that we can enter and occupy, in which the water draws us down to its edge. It spatialises the water below ground that we need to live, and its beautiful architecture asks us to consider what this means to us.

My photographs of India’s stepwells attempt to give a record of these extraordinary ambiances.

They contemplate what the wells have become and suggest what they might have once meant to their original users, for whom these structures were at once functional, social,...

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