David Trattles combines adventure with photography. A social documentary photographer from Canada, he has travelled across 60 countries on his bicycle.

“I like meeting people and the good way to do it is on a bicycle. I photograph the people I meet - photographs have a memory. I meet people at their places and my photographs are not ‘manufactured’ or set up. It is just as they are,” he said during a chat with Metrolife.

Trattles’s exhibition of 41 photographs, `Out there Canada’ about Canadian rural life is on at Tasveer, the photo gallery at Sua House, 26/1, Kasturba Cross Road from January 9 to 23.

 “Out There Canada is a very general photoessay about some aspects of life in rural Canada - the aspect of Canada short on history and raw with geography. The phrase `Out there’ can have two senses: it can imply a remote geographical distance; it also refers to behaviour that is unique - the legacy of Canada is woven from the fabric of unconventional people,” he says.

“Although it is often said that Canada has no identity, the truest sense of Canada can be felt as a frontier, as the second largest country in the world, almost 4 million square miles in size, with 1,51,000 mile long border,” he adds.

For the past ten years, David has worked with marginalised groups who have managed to preserve their story - their identity through collective celebrations, yet have managed to move forward within a mainstream of increasingly globalised culture. They do this by looking at themselves, their friends, their family and raise themselves above the chaos of life.

Trattles says, “Over the past few years, I have produced photographic essays on Muslim women boxers of Kolkata, rural Newfoundlanders, urban Inuit of Ottawa, and unemployed Germans living as full-time cowboys in Eastern Germany. The work has an unifying theme: marginalised groups who have managed to preserve an identity, and have moved forward within the mainstream of an increasingly globalised culture.”

About his Indian experience he says: “My first visit to India was 15 years ago enroute a bicycle journey from Turkey to Hong Kong and to photograph my journey I had only two rolls for one year. My photoessay on Muslim Boxers of Kolkata is about girls who box and they happen to be Muslim. It will brought out as a book by The Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, Kolkata.’’

“I have travelled on the bicycle across 60 countries and have been to India four times. I did a bicycle journey from Delhi to Kolkata on the Grand Trunk Road in two-and-a-half weeks. My next trip would be cycling from Kolkata to Chennai. I don’t plan my journey. I just start going and photograph the little things I see on the way.”

His recent on-going projects include: women Muslim boxers of Calcutta, the people of Fogo Island (Newfoundland), the villagers of Balzan (Malta), the cowboys of the German Rodeo, the festival townspeople of Bunol (Spain), the ferrogusto of Novara (Sicily).

“Photography is easy, it is not like surgery. The only thing that matters is the way you look at the people,” he says.