How did I find myself at the bottom of a well in India?

Quite literally immersing myself in my obsession with India’s ancient stepwells.

Disillusioned with my job and my career, I walked away from a well-paid job in the City. Fast forward eight days, I found myself on my way to India.

I had no idea that this trip would spark an obsession with stepwells. Ancient sub-ground feats of engineering, built to manage precious water and offer some respite from the heat. Upside-down pyramids, I called them – a precursor to air conditioning, perhaps.

I was transfixed by these extraordinary structures: their symmetry, their scale, the stonework and brilliance. At Chand Baori, one of the oldest and most spectacular stepwells in India, the sheer geometry of thousands of steps descending into the earth was mesmerising. Mind-bending, even.

In England, we had Vikings running about, and England wasn’t really “England” yet.

I was determined to see and descend into as many as I could, travelling across six states and Delhi.

The Queen’s Stepwell, Patan. A monumental descent into stone, symmetry and centuries of history.

Two wonderful drivers chaperoned my expedition, driving hundreds of miles and translating along the way. I’m forever indebted to them for their kindness and companionship.

Sometimes, I’d show a photograph of a stepwell to a group of kids on bikes. They’d point me and my driver in the right direction. Sometimes that led us to ruins, giant cobwebs and deep, forgotten wells.

I suspect the locals thought I was mad. And rightly so. I’m sure it’s rare that anyone rocked up asking to see these sites with dreamy eyes, from the UK.

But I was possessed. I came home with hundreds of photographs and a feeling I hadn’t experienced in a long time: I felt truly alive.

It’s difficult not to fall in love with India. I’d go back in a heartbeat.

A vast, sunken landscape of arches and stone corridors. From above, it’s hard to appreciate just how far these ancient structures descend.

India changed the way I looked at life, people, places – what I was doing…

How do we relate to one another? How do we communicate without sharing a language? A photograph can bridge a gap that words alone cannot.

That trip became the beginning of a new chapter in my relationship with photography. I started looking beyond the obvious subject and paying closer attention to the interactions, the connections and the little moments that tell us something about being human.

Unbeknownst to me, I would return home determined to change direction. Away from a managerial role, away from servicing requirements and towards a creative life: ideas from my head becoming something real. A lightbulb moment, perhaps, although it took time for me to understand quite how much had shifted.

The stepwells themselves spoke of community, ingenuity and working with nature; what we have. Built centuries ago, many remain destinations today. They were never simply holes in the ground. They were places shaped by the needs of people, by the environment and by the lives lived around them.

Leaving my career in the City wasn’t the end of anything. It was the beginning of something new.

I couldn’t have known, standing at the bottom of those ancient wells in India, where the journey would eventually take me. I only knew that the life I’d left behind no longer fitted.

Sometimes an ending isn’t an ending at all.

Looking back, I can see how much that experience gave me permission to trust my own creativity. I didn’t have a neat plan for what came next. I just knew I wanted to follow the ideas that excited me, to make things, and to see where they led.

That instinct eventually found its way into my artwork, too. The photographs and experiences I brought home became part of a much longer creative journey — one that continues to evolve. You can see some of that journey in my artworks.

A little bit of Sally in Varanasi. India was full of surprises — and a mural with my government name that made me stop and smile.

We don’t die, we transcend.

P.S. I still don’t know how a terrapin got into the bottom of Chand Baori. It’s 13 storeys below ground!

If you enjoy stories about the unexpected ways our past shapes who we become, you might also like Lost But Found — a reflection on childhood photographs, memory and the strange fragments of the past that photography can help us rediscover.

And if you’re curious about the person behind the camera, you can read more about my journey on my About page.

Discover more of my work, from fine art photography in London to photographing the people, energy and moments that make an event memorable with my London party photography