The kite-flier's camera

Nicholas Chorier's aerial photographs provide wonderfully unfamiliar perspectives of familiar Indian monuments and vistas.

Kites are not just for flying. Nicholas Chorier uses them to shoot photographs "" exquisite aerial shots of the Taj Mahal, the forts of Rajasthan and the ghats of Benaras, the Kumbh and Pushkar melas, the beaches of Mamallapuram and Kovalam, Kallaripayattu dancers, and many others.

Taken from high up, with a camera mounted on a rig that hangs some way below the kite, Chorier's photographs afford a different, and often spectacular, visual perspective of these familiar monuments and scenes.

Take Chorier's aerial shots of the lotus-shaped Bahai temple, seen on the back cover of Kite's Eye View India, Between Earth and Sky, published by Roli Books (Rs 2,975), of around 200 of the photographs he's taken in India.

Visitors to the monument are told the structure has a central dome and nine sides, symbolising the unity of the major world faiths. But it's only in bird's-eye-view that one can truly appreciate its symmetry, harmony and boldness.

Chorier, a French national, has been an exponent of kite aerial photography for short, for 10 years now. A sound engineer before he switched professions, it was while working on a survey of the kite-flying traditions of South-east Asia, the patangs of India and Indonesia, and the wau of Malayasia, that he stumbled upon kite aerial photography.

"There were only a handful of people doing kite aerial photography then," he says. "But now there's a whole community, with Internet forums and the like, which practices it. But I'm probably the only one who does it for a living."

Chorier's kites aren't small "" the smallest is around 3 sq ft while the largest reaches 40 sq ft. As he explains in his book, "The rig can be operated by remote control and can achieve a full 360-degree rotation and 90-degree tilt. An air-to-ground video link sends a signal which provides real-time monitoring on a portable TV screen, for accurate framing."

On the ground (or a boat), Chorier sets up the kite. Once the kite is flying nice and high, he sets the rig on the string, operating the remote control and using the video monitor slung around his neck to shoot. It might sound cumbersome, but Chorier says "the whole set-up is very flexible".

Chorier has shot extensively all over the world "" on commissions to survey experimental crops for French agricultural research body CIRAD in Brazil and erosion along the banks of the Mekong in Laos, or to track whale-watching tourists in Mexico.

But his principal clients remain town-planners, architects, tourism departments. This is one reason Chorier sees himself as a "craftsman" rather than an artist, which many modern photographers have been laying claim to.

Like a craftsman too, Chorier makes his own kites with siliconised nylon and carbon or fiberglass sticks. "The two holes in my kites are my innovation and give it stability."

The other problem Chorier has about claiming his photographs as art is, of course, what may be called the contemporary "art economy". "When a client asks me for the price of a photograph, I tell him, say $200, calculating what it cost me to take it. But I can't ask for $1,000 simply because it is art. Nah...that's not me," he says with a Gallic shrug.

But he hopes that Kite's Eye View, which is also being published in France, the US and other countries, will fetch him a new respectability in mainstream photography.

Kite aerial photography is not new, Chorier says, going back to 1889 when Frenchman Arthur Batut first hoisted a timed camera on a kite and took photographs of his house from 420 feet above.

"Kite photography was extensively used during World War I for spying activities, especially to detect submarines" Chorier says. Indeed, the residue of suspicion remains, with aerial photography continuing to be banned in India. More than once, Chorier has been taken in by the authorities, who've questioned him for hours, wanting to know his business, see his passport, his visas. "I didn't know it, but I had strayed very close to sensitive locations," he says with a laugh.

But setting aside these stray incidents, Chorier feels a deep gratitude for India, especially his publishers, for giving him the opportunity to show his work.

"In a sense, I feel like I am giving something back to the country"" that I didn't, like the colonialists of yore, simply 'steal' without giving back anything."