Picture Matrimonia (1)

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Mahesh Shantaram

Born in 1977, Mahesh Shantaram lived abroad for many years. After studying at the Spéos School of Photography in Paris, he returned to his home city of Bangalore, in Karnataka state, and in 2006 decided to specialise in wedding photography. As can be seen in the series Matrimania, on show here, he draws on his professional work for more personal projects.

As the most commercially successful segment of the photo business in India, wedding photography holds up a magnifying mirror to Indian society, for better and for worse. Mahesh Shantaram, however, is a special case. After an unsuccessful attempt at going freelance, he realised that weddings were the surest way to live off his skills, even if the job commands little respect: "In India," he says, "wedding photographers are considered unrefined, naive and unintelligent." Despite family pressure he went ahead, determined to revitalize the genre. And now his approach – subjective but honest, witty and human – has made him one of his country's most esteemed wedding photographers.
"Weddings are a space-time zone where people are out to impress but can behave in the most horrendous ways. At a wedding society's strengths and weaknesses are laid bare. In India a wedding ceremony is taken extremely seriously for the impact it can have on thousands of guests who waste no time in pegging the family's social status."
Fascinated by these short-lived scenes, Mahesh Shantaram approaches them in a documentary spirit. The decors that loom so large in Matrimania are highly revelatory of the urge to impress with appearances and of the money people are ready to spend on this. In these images close attention to detail highlights "my country's penchant for order and chaos, for colour and noise, together with a very particular sense of design and 'good taste' — or of the latter's absence."