Calcutta is rich. Although the city is associated with pictures of dire poverty throughout Europe, it is also a place of abundance. College Street is surrounded by tens of thousands of bookshops, a maze made out of millions of books, where the small, colourful stalls of street vendors stand next to giant halls with printing shops and publishing houses. While Ilija Trojanow strolls wonderingly through these alleys of books, Anja Bohnhof quickly blocks the busy streets and takes artful photographs of these gaudy shops. The cosmos of books in all its overwhelming beauty.
Ilija Trojanow, born in 1965 in Sofia, Bulgaria, grew up in Kenya and lived in India for several years after studying in Germany. He celebrated his greatest success to date with The Collector of Worlds in 2006 and has won several literary awards.
Anja Bohnhof, born in Hagen, Germany, in 1974, studied photography at Bauhaus University in Weimar. She now works as a freelance photographer and teaches at Cologne University of Applied Sciences. She has won several sponsorship awards and scholarships, and her works have been shown in numerous international exhibitions.