Issue 68 - Reflected in the Light
The second photograph was taken fifty years and five thousand miles away in India and it shows a man who isn’t famous at all and probably wasn’t even an angler. We don’t know his name, but we know the weight of the fish he is holding up, a ‘good mahseer’ of fifty-one pounds. Given the long exposures that had to be used in those days and the total lack of shadow, the photograph must have been taken in the shade, which means that our man must have stood there, holding fifty-one pounds of fish, for half a minute or more and yet, even though his biceps are outlined against his ribs with the effort, he hasn’t broken out into a sweat.

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