The makers of the film Tomorrow We Disappear describe it as a "dark fairy tale" about Kathputli, India's "last colony" of puppeteers and magicians.

One-Eyed Bhatt is one of the few remaining master puppeteers. Here he readies one of his puppets for performance, unraveling some of the 18 strings that are used to bring the figures to life. One-Eyed Bhatt is the oldest puppeteer remaining in Kathputli. He spent his childhood as an itinerant performer, playing music, puppeteering and telling mythic tales in small villages.

Joshua Cogan

A balloon vendor in the afternoon light.

Joshua Cogan

A mother warming a fire for the evening meal.

Joshua Cogan

A woman adjusts her sari in the colony's tight alleys.

Joshua Cogan

Stacks of carousel seats sit in Kathputli's alleyways and have become makeshift jungle gyms for the children. Laws have been implemented to limit street performance, and the artists have had to rely on other means to make money.

Joshua Cogan

Young puppeteer Kailash performs in the House of Puppets, a nonprofit he created to help teach folk traditions to future generations of performers.

Joshua Cogan

A wedding band gathers around the entrance of the groom's house in one of the colony's many celebrations. During the run-up to the event, the streets flood with people; rupees are tossed in the air; and drum processions compete with one another for speed and intensity.

Joshua Cogan

Ishamuddin is the only known performer of the Indian rope trick, a legendary act of illusion in which a rope climbs in the air under its own power and is strong enough to support the weight of a small child scrambling to the top. He has flown around the world to demonstrate this skill, but does not teach magic to his children, seeing no future in it for them.

Joshua Cogan

Young children gather on a spinner as an old man turns the wheel.

Joshua Cogan

Maya Pawas, 16, is an acrobat in Kathputli. Her parents began stretching her limbs when she was only 3 years old. Now she is widely regarded as the most talented acrobat in the colony.

Joshua Cogan

Hussein, the oldest remaining magician in the colony, with one of his two doves.

Joshua Cogan

Children who used to grow up as itinerants now grow up in the slum that is Kathputli. The older kids grow up quickly, trying to find a way to succeed in the new India. For the younger ones, the India that awaits them is very different from the one their parents knew.

Joshua Cogan

Kailash, a young puppeteer performs in the "House of Puppets," a non-profit he created to help teach the folk traditions to the future generations of performers.

Joshua Cogan

A fire-breather in the Kathputli Colony, New Delhi, India.

Joshua Cogan

"The acrobats do amazing feats of human form," says photographer Joshua Cogan, "and they're actually the progenitors of yoga."

Joshua Cogan

The filmmakers behind a forthcoming documentary describe New Delhi's Kathputli Colony as a "tinsel slum": For decades, it has been home to a community of traditionally itinerant performers — puppeteers, acrobats, magicians and fire-breathers. Foreigners might call them artists; but in India, says photographer Joshua Cogan, they're still considered to be a lower caste of vagrants.

Cogan is the director of photography for the film Tomorrow We Disappear. The still photos he took during film production will be on display starting today in Washington, D.C., for the city's FotoWeek.

He and his team (Jim Goldblum and Adam Weber) were inspired to pursue the story, Cogan explains, when they read about a resettlement agreement, in which the Kathputli Colony's centrally located land was bought out to build a skyscraper. The film explores what the change might mean for the people who live there — and for their traditions. (For literary buffs, the "magician's ghetto" was fictionalized in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.)

"I didn't want to make it like a sob story," Cogan says. "In some ways it's like a dark fairy tale." His images of the Kathputli community aren't overwrought with sentiment; conclusions are left for the viewer to make.

In a way, the project reflects aspects of Cogan's own life. Just this year, his art studio — what he described as one of the only "underground arts communities" in Washington, D.C. — was bought out for condo development. In his words, no matter where you are, "the pressures of trying to make a living as an artist are very difficult."

The story also pivots around an age-old tension between preserving tradition and embracing change.

"You have a couple people that try to take the art forms and move them forward, especially the puppetry," says Cogan. "But the problem is that on the streets, no one has the time to watch the stuff anymore. There's 3-D Bollywood movies."

While Cogan focused on a slum in Delhi, the same can be said of many developing urban areas. Perhaps that's just how it goes, though. Do cultures die? Or do they just evolve over time?

"In India they literally have, like, a thousand years of tradition being crushed right now," Cogan says. "It's tough not to get trapped in the nostalgia. It probably serves an important purpose, but it's sort of like a pathology, too.

"The truth is, it's very hard to help somebody."

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