Abir Choudhury is a documentary photographer based in Kolkata, the city he calls home and where he first picked up a camera in 2012. His work has travelled further than he expected, to the Siena International Photo Award and to the Indian Photo Festival, which named him Photographer of the Year in the street category in 2022. But the body of work he keeps returning to is the one that returns with the monsoon each year.

Kolkata Monsoon did not begin as a project. It began as individual photographs, made because the rain was changing the city from its familiar shape. Buildings dissolved into mist. Traffic slowed. People moved differently, routes changed, and everything took longer. He photographed what caught his attention without yet knowing these separate moments would eventually belong to one another.

Abir began to notice his photographs accumulating into something larger than the moments they recorded. Waterlogged streets, reflections, crowded shelters, moments of waiting. “That was when I decided to approach it as a sustained project rather than a collection of separate photographs,” he says. He would go back to the same streets, across the same weeks, year after year, and watch what the monsoon season did to them.

The change that mattered most was in the subject. “Instead of trying to document the rain itself, I became interested in how people experience and adapt to the monsoon.” The weather became the setting rather than the story.

Rain resurfaces the city. The ground stops taking light in and begins holding it, and for a few weeks Kolkata has a floor that answers back. “Puddles become mirrors,” he says. Colours saturate, then mute. Headlights and streetlights diffuse. Drops, mist and umbrellas build layers in the frame that he does not have to arrange. Movement is everywhere, people running, wheels through standing water, churning the water, and he chooses each time whether to freeze the movement or allow it to unfold.

Standing still is central to his method. He finds a place that holds the possibility of a photograph, a reflection or a break in the cloud, and waits for someone to enter the space he has chosen. Sometimes for several minutes. Sometimes the photograph remains just out of reach. “I cannot control what will happen, but I can position myself, observe carefully, and be ready when the moment arrives.”

The rain arrives across Kolkata everywhere at once. What the monsoon demands is another matter, and years of walking into it have settled that knowledge into the work without ever making it the subject. “I don't think the monsoon is experienced equally across Kolkata,” he says. The same rainfall, he explains, “can mean very different things depending on where you live, what kind of work you do, and how secure your living conditions are.” In neighbourhoods with poor drainage, water comes into homes and ruins what it touches. For vendors and rickshaw pullers and people paid by the day, a flooded street is a day of earnings gone. A short walk away, the identical rain is a delayed commute. “The physical distance between these experiences can sometimes be surprisingly small, yet the consequences are very different.”

Difficulty is in the work without being what the work is made of. He knows how easily a season collapses into one feeling, and how generous rain is to whichever feeling a photographer chooses. “I try not to romanticise these conditions,” he says. Children play in the rain. Two strangers end up under one umbrella. Friends laugh their way across a crossing they cannot avoid. Families gather in whatever shelter is nearest. “A person struggling through floodwater can also laugh, play, help someone else, or find a moment of happiness. Those emotions are equally truthful.” He is firm about it. “I also wanted to avoid turning the people I photograph into symbols of suffering.”

A single photograph can become a verdict, whatever the person holding the camera intended. A series has more room for contradiction, which may be the real reason Abir keeps going back.

The season itself has begun to feel less reliable to him. Rain that comes late. Rain that arrives all at once and transforms a street within the hour. “I am careful not to claim that every change I have observed is directly caused by climate change,” he says, though walking the city in this season for so long has made him attentive to how quickly heavy rain finds the weak points in it. “These are not abstract environmental issues when you are walking through the streets and witnessing their consequences directly.”

That has slowly widened what the project is for. It has become a record of how Kolkata and the people in it meet an environment they can no longer predict. “The monsoon is never exactly the same, and neither is the city,” he says. “By photographing it over time, I am documenting a changing Kolkata as much as I am documenting the rain.”

He has no illusions about scale. A city of this size cannot be photographed and a season cannot be summarised. “I can preserve fragments," he says, and seems content with that. Streets change. Buildings come down. People move away. What he wants is for someone, years from now, to look at these photographs and know what it was like to walk through Kolkata in the monsoon season. Not only the water. The people in it, and the life continuing.

There is one sentence he offers almost in passing that describes the whole undertaking. “Water has taught me to look twice.”