Wouter Vanhees – Against the Tide

Against the Tide is Wouter Vanhees’ tribute to Mumbai, his adopted hometown from 2022 to 2024.

The book takes the viewer on a personal visual journey throughout the city, interwoven with a peek inside the lives of Wouter’s friends Sidharth, Apurv, Ashish, Utkarsh, and Varun. The music they create together with their post-hardcore band Pacifist forms the soundtrack and inspiration to his work, while these five Mumbaikars personally became part of it by opening their homes and lives to Wouter and his camera. Pacifist’s music may be non-traditional for India, but in Wouter’s view, it is the perfect exponent of what Mumbai is in this day and age: an often chaotic kaleidoscope of contrasting cultures and the most diverse histories and traditions, where dream and reality collide.

The result is a layered, intimate, and contemporary portrait of this incredible ‘City of Dreams’.

"Photobooks never cease to surprise me. The book is a versatile medium that can become so many things. Belgian photographer Wouter Vanhees’ Against the Tide goes down its own path, and the best way I can describe it is to say that it reads like a film-noir-inspired storyboard for a music video.

It is set in Mumbai and is about a post-hardcore punk band called Pacifist. It is also about the city, which becomes like a character in the story. Although actually there is no story or plot in a literal sense, but there is coherence and direction to the narrative." - Extract from a text by Hans Hickerson

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