I rarely use travel guides! I don’t like the instructional character of those books. For my travels I try to use references from movies, novels, songs, news and of course, random stories. A great influence for my travelling and the idealism that I constructed around it, were the comic albums I was reading since very young: the travels of Asterix from Goscinny and Uderzo and the adventures of Tintin from Hergé.

My star sign, I was told, dictates that I should stay my home and loathe travelling!
When I travel with my camera, this familiar dark box with the selective shutter creates an illusion of home. The fear of the unknown gets overtaken by the yearning of the explorer.

I had been travelling with photography for many years and I was accumulating photographs. I needed a good starting point in organising my fabrication.

The idea behind the eleven photographs came when I was waiting for the Wide Views of Physical Places to be printed and phrased to a friend my reservations on having eleven photographs in printed for that show. Fortunately my friend had a good knowledge of Numerology and impressed me explaining the significance of the number eleven. Subsequently, I did my research and out of pages and pages of classifications devoted to eleven I found my favourite: “eleven is the first number which cannot be represented by a human counting his or her eight fingers and two thumbs additively, and actually requires as an alternative for the human to count additively including the toes”.

Nevertheless I had the focal point for the organisation of this project.
Eleven travels with eleven photographs each.

The final state of this project was to compile all the booklets together, along with an introduction written by Anurag Jain, in one book, called 11x11.