Stories in Snapshots
Documentary photographer Sephi Bergerson is drawn to the unusual happenings at Indian weddings and chats with VARSHA NAIK about depicting them through images
Last month in Goa amongst friends and fans, award-winning photographer Sephi Bergerson introduced Behind the
Indian Veil, a book on Indian weddings traditions. Sephi, who grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel, uses his documentary experience as the lens through which he captures weddings across India. The result – an assortment of images of sacred traditions and complex ceremonies that reflect the likeness and the diversities of weddings rituals in the country.
The journey
On completing three years in the paratroops regiment of the Israeli army, at the age of 21, Sephi, whose family hails from Poland, moved to New York City to pursue his interest in photography. He returned two years later to study photography at the Hadassah Institute of Technology in Jerusalem. “No place kept our imagination like India,” he says about how after having lived in Paris and San Francisco as well, in 2002 he moved with his family to India.
In 2007, after completing his book,
Street Food of India, a friend asked him to photograph her sister’s wedding, though he had not covered weddings in the past. A Tamilian Brahmin wedding, this was one of the most elaborate weddings he had attended. Sephi recalls the unusual experience, “The priests were chanting and pouring stuff into the fire and saying swaha, and I didn’t know if this is the most important ceremony. So, from 5 am for four hours I shoot like it’s war, like this is the frame of all frames – thousands of pictures without knowing any better. In the meantime, people have breakfast and come back while it’s just me with the couple, the priests and the fire.”
Sephi explains the rationale behind the book that captures 16 wedding traditions. “For someone like me who was ignorant of the culture, a foreigner with just an imagination of what Indian weddings really are, there were new things at every wedding I attended. And while trying to give examples of what an Indian wedding really is, it became a journey of trying to understand what the term means,” he adds. Most images are from weddings where the couple have the same cultural background. While shooting, he shows the wedding through his eyes with all the filters that come with him.
The book’s layout is such that it has a full page on one side and a framed page on the other. A sequence of images with no captions is followed by a page with text; this keeps the pages uncluttered and creates a back and forth between images and their stories. “I’ve noticed that the book often serves as a conversation starter, reminding people of celebrations they’ve been a part of,” Sephi says.
Unusual scenes
After covering about eight weddings, a friend called Sephi about a mass nikah in the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community in Mumbai. After trying to get permission with no concrete response, he decided to show up and shoot the procession, which was out in the street. As the grooms headed to the mosque, Sephi walked amongst them documenting the scene around him – the grooms and noisy band, people watching from windows and women with their children. “Though I’m a non-practitioner, I was essentially a Jewish photographer with no real permission to be there, standing outside the mosque at the beginning of a religious ceremony.” He entered anyway and was welcomed by the living spiritual leader, who conducted this mass wedding for 318 couples, to photograph the happenings.
The most enjoyable wedding that Sephi had attended was a Ladakhi Buddhist wedding that broke all stereotypes, “It was nothing that you expect to see. The couple had been together for 10 years with two children already. The wedding was more of a social affair without a priest or lama to solemnise it.” Villagers gathered for salt tea and lunch in a simple pandal, while the couple’s parents greeted their friends. Each guest blessed the bride and groom with scarves. Wedding gifts for the couple consisted of necessary commodities like wool, blankets, carpets, furniture and most surprisingly – 500 gram packs of butter. “The idea is the community lends the couple a first fortune to start their life. Throughout their life they pay it back with interest as bigger wedding gifts,” Sephi clarifies. He notes that there was no photographer and doesn’t foresee a market for wedding photography here. “Perhaps as Buddhists they live in the now and don’t care about pictures,” he adds.
To see a traditional Kashmiri Pandit wedding, Sephi waited two years and the celebration made for an excellent subject. The wedding starts with a musical evening with professional musicians and a male dancer dressed as a woman, called the bacha, who dances and entertains everyone all night. Sephi also photographed a unique ceremony where the bride’s upper ear cartilage is pierced enabling her to wear special jewellery reserved for married Kashmiri Pandit women.
Inspiring and educating
The only way to be a good photographer is to stay immersed in the field, Sephi says. He outlines three ways for learning – experience, inference and knowledge sources. “It’s crucial to discern who are the right knowledge sources, because there are a lot of charlatans out there who only tell you what you want to hear,” he emphasises. He believes that we must all be in service to improve things we can – to do seva in some form. He does it in the field he has some influence over, improving the photography industry. “If someone wants to learn from me, there’s no limit – I share everything I have.” In 2012, Sephi launched the SILK PHOTOS website with some fellow photographers, to facilitate easy reference of spillover assignments between an elite group of photographers. This boutique photo agency is now a platform for reputed wedding photographers, and has a mentorship programme called RAW SILK for photographers with promising talent in the industry. Under the banner of SILK INSPIRE, in 2016 they held India’s first wedding photography festival. “This first festival was about inspiration, to expose Indian photographers to how foreign photographers think, who they’d never had the opportunity to meet. It was like lightening in the middle of a summer day – it changed the industry,” Sephi states.
Last year was about diversity of techniques and pushing attendees to go beyond the basics, to explore and experiment. This year, the festival will take place in Bengaluru from October 3-7 and will highlight two main topics – running a successful business and the essence of documentary photography. The hope is to encourage Indian photographers to develop and streamline their technique, and find their unique voice as storytellers. “Everyone experiences weddings differently – it’s about finding a story within the wedding, locking on to that thread and telling that story through photographs.” The festival will also focus on closing the gender gap in the Indian wedding photography industry. Sephi gives the example of 23-year-old South African photographer Tshepiso Mazibuko, introduced to photography through an NGO, who uses the medium to document the lives of people in her town. He hopes that such stories will inspire more women in India to pursue this field.
Sephi is currently working on a long-term personal project exploring religious dogma and sexuality, a series of black and white images he hopes will make a bold statement, but with subtle finesse. “The idea is not to consciously offend or create outrage by attacking someone’s beliefs,” he says, “It’s to make you uncomfortable and face the mirror, face your own fears and question your own perceptions.” Shot in graveyards and abandoned structures, the images challenge and interplay religious symbology, drawing attention to the taboos of religious organisation.