Dougie Wallace’s Road Wallah is built around a vehicle that has nearly vanished from Mumbai’s streets. The Premier Padmini, introduced in the 1960s and known locally as Kaali-Peeli, once numbered more than 60,000; pollution regulations have since driven the black-and-yellow taxi almost out of service. Over four years Wallace photographed these cars and the people who rode in them, treating each cab as an interior: loud upholstery, posters of Bollywood actresses, speakers mounted in the boot, Hindu gods and goddesses fixed to the dashboard. The city outside supplies the pressure; the cab supplies the stage.
Wallace, London-based and long recognised for expressive social documentary, works in a direct street idiom in which human behaviour is the starting point. His stated interest lies in people, their interactions and emotions, which he translates into social wit, criticism and humorous vignettes. That temperament suits the subject. A taxi is a commercial transaction, a confined social encounter and a small theatre of display at once, and the book holds those registers together without flattening them into mere anecdote.
The photographs are printed as a large-format hardback, 37 by 28 centimetres, with 96 pages and 65 colour images. The scale matters: it allows the density of the decoration, the gestures of passengers and the crush of traffic to register in the same frame. Wallace had already published Stags, Hens & Bunnies and Shoreditch Wildlife before this book appeared in 2016, and his work had been exhibited in Europe, the United States and India. Road Wallah was named among the RPS Journal’s ten best books of that year.
For a collector, the book’s claim rests on its subject and its manner of seeing rather than on scarcity. It records a specific urban culture at the moment of its erasure, and it does so through a photographer whose humour is inseparable from his observation. Read alongside the earlier books, it shows Wallace applying a consistent documentary intelligence to a subject that is at once public infrastructure and private fantasy.
