Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Tasveer Journal’

Of Matrimonia

It shall be high wedding season in North America shortly, but throughout South Asia, weddings are celebrated year-round with much pomp, even if the circumstances are mundane and replayed ad nauseum for both participants and attendees. Recently, Tasveer Journal featured the work of Mahesh Shantaram, a self-described “cubicle-bot” who left the Beltways of Washington, D.C. to study photography in Paris and later, work as a wedding photographer in India. Through the course of his work, Shantaram recognized a full-fledged allegory for the tenuous and unfolding middle-classes of the subcontinent.

Everything that’s great about our country and everything that’s wrong with it can be summarised by a single wedding. Today, I’m able to express that more sincerely through this long-term project that is evolving into a form of visual poetry rather than a hard-hitting critical essay. Matrimania is the ‘dark’ narrative from a world that I’m very familiar with. It helps me balance the ‘sweet’ narrative that I construct in service of clients. That balance is necessary to preserve one’s view of life.

To read more about Shantaram’s work, as well as view a few images from Matrimonia (which will soon be developed into a documentary), click here.