Most mornings while heading for a swim or the gym, I pass a popular bar that’s become more sought-after as the location for couple’s photoshoots. There’s a battery of photographers spread outside the brightly painted façade while a couple hold hands and strike poses. While they gaze into each other’s eyes, sometimes the photographers are so caught up in the shoot that they stray much further onto the road than it’s safe. They value creativity above life, perhaps.
I always pause for a few seconds as the bar is at an intersection. And I can’t help smiling at anyone who looks my way before driving off. Happiness is contagious even if it’s staged. Today’s couple wore identical white shirts and blue jeans – so I guess the mood was casual. Love looks good in anything, doesn’t it?
Thinking about the memories the couple seeks to create forever after, reminded me of the piles of photos – some in albums and some loose – that I keep putting off sorting. They hail from the days before the phone gallery or social media became the de facto albums. All my attempts over the last several years to sort them and keep only the most meaningful ones have been in vain. While those photos hold memories of happier times most often, they take one down a rabbit hole. The images of loved ones lost, of friends who are now distant, of times when everything (and everyone) was shiny and bright, create a melancholy mood.
Mercifully they are not as numerous as the photos that we save to our phones. A couple of months ago I bought a new phone and while earlier the data could be transferred from an old phone to a new one in an hour or so, this time it couldn’t be done even after 12 hours. I had to spend several mind-numbing hours deleting videos and photos before the mission could be accomplished. It’s vanity at fault – we take pictures seated, standing, pouting, posing; we hold the phone horizontal and vertical. We video everything that moves and every time we move. Every meal is photographed and posted as if the whole world is the strict dietician who needs to see your plate.
On the flip side, it’s far easier to delete photos from the phone than to dispose of printed pictures. It seems a bigger wrench to shred a photo manually. It has something to do with the physical act of tearing it or placing in a shredding machine that makes it more final than hitting delete forever on a gadget.
My meandering thoughts went back to the professional photographers who I see most mornings and I realised that very rarely do I see female photographers at such shoots. Rather strange really as there are plenty of talented women in the business. Perhaps they are more expensive than their male counterparts.
And what about the couples themselves? Are they happy spinning a fantasy romance from a script seen on reels? What will happen when the photographer ceases to tell them when and how wide they should smile, where to sit, where to hold, to hug? Beyond the façade of an empty bar, what future have they dreamed for themselves? Can they direct their own lives?
We have come to ‘perform’ love rather than live it. I interviewed a woman in Bengal for a project I am working on. Like most parents, she’s living out her fantasy through her daughter, but this extended only to a Bollywood style choreographed romance. She told me she spends most of her time dreaming of the exotic wedding she’s going to arrange for her daughter and saving links from reels. Though she grumbled that she had to account for every rupee she spends to her parents-in-laws, she doesn’t dream of the career her college- going daughter could have or the independent life that she could lead. It’s quite likely that her daughter will blow up a packet on a photoshoot, though I am rooting for her to use the money to study further or start her own business.
Picture-perfect memories are fine but acting out scripts of someone else’s vision of relationships is not authentic. The faked ‘surprise’ proposals enrich only the photographers. True partnership is not in curated moments of perfectness. A shared reality is when two people set off to script their story together, when they look at each other not for the photographer’s lens but to see the real person beside them. It’s this person who they have to grow to love, and not a fantasy.
Sandhya Mendonca, author, biographer, and publisher, casts a female gaze at the world in this column.
