The marriage photography album, containing black and white photographs primarily of the wedding ceremony, is one of the precursors to the marriage video. Photography is also cited as an influence-cum-practice ground by the videographers I interviewed about their marriage videography; they repeatedly stressed their interest in image-making, and how accompanying photographers on assignments honed their practice with the moving image.
One of the prevalent practices in the 1980s was the exchanging of photographs between prospective brides and grooms and their families. Since this exchange is located in the private sphere, I have drawn upon visual material from my own extended family for analysis. Photographic collections of my paternal and maternal grandmothers have yielded portraits of my aunts, as well as other prospective matches for my uncles and father. To my consternation, there were no such portrait photos of the men. A reading of these photos from my grandparents’ collections reveals distinctly different practices for men and women. It is important to note that family photography records document and archive the everyday, functioning as mnemonic aids. Moreover, these photographs reveal not just the social and historical representations of the family, but also the ideological underpinnings of gender and class.
The photographs of women were in black and white or colour, usually portraits shot in a studio. The black and white portraits of prospective brides were close-ups captured from the chin to the top of the head, or from the top of the shoulders to the head. The lighting is diffuse, the face is slightly tilted to the side instead of being represented frontally, and the subject is generally shown wearing traditional clothes, either a pinned-up saree or a salwar kameez and dupatta. These portraits perform a version of femininity that is youthful, beautiful, and traditional, qualities that need to be demonstrated in an arranged marriage set-up, where first impressions are made through photographs.
These practices seem to be common to bridal photography across the globe, where there is an effort to create an idealised image of the wedding ceremony. Research on the role of bridal photography in the Asian community in North America shows how bridal photography tends to perform three interrelated functions. It functions firstly as a visual record and emphasises gender, youth, and beauty of the bridal body. Secondly, the photographs focus on the performance of ethnicity and lastly, the wedding day signifies notions of tradition and culture. It marks an extension of filial obligations and the performance of ethnicity.
Work done on traditional wedding photography in North America demonstrates that professional photographers are expected to create an ideal and thus their images are considered “legitimate or codified constructions of the ritual experience”. In a non-Western context, research on the photographic practices prevalent in the East African Coast explores the different ways in which light is used in wedding photography, particularly in the way women, especially brides, are photographed. The process of being photographed constitutes image-making in itself. Wedding photography in India is a process of idealised image-making that participates in the codified construction of marriage rituals, and notions of femininity. I will illustrate this through a small snippet culled from my interviews and a visit to a Delhi-based studio known for matrimonial photography.
Prem Studios located first at Kamala Nagar, is one of the most famous studios for matrimonial photography and videography in the city. The studio opened in 1957 only to be shut down soon thereafter. It reopened in 1971, coming to prominence because, as Dheeraj, the current owner of Prem Studios stated during our conversation:
[my father’s] USP was matrimonial photography. Both my father and my uncles were blessed with the gift of lighting and face study and knew which angle and light suited a person best. During those days, only the girl’s photograph was given to the groom and not vice versa. We live in a traditional society. Hence, taking a good picture is a must and that is how we distinguished ourselves from the competition.
Such was Prem’s reputation that I still hear stories told with an undercurrent of admiration – as well as a tinge of mild complaint – that he used to make people appear better than they actually looked. Dheeraj’s comments and the reputation of the studio reveal the social function of marriage photography; it is not just the photographs of the actual wedding, but also the photographs of prospective brides taken for circulation among the families of prospective grooms that constitute the world of wedding photography. This aspect of matrimonial photography does not merely function as a mnemonic aid but is also indicative of the sociocultural norms of the day. In a society that privileges the practice of arranged marriages primarily to reinforce the prevailing order of class and caste, the matrimonial photograph points to the role of gender.
Dheeraj’s comments provide us with clues about the importance of capturing matrimony-related events on camera. The way a woman is shot in these portraits points to a gendered aesthetic configuration. In our conversations, Dheeraj enthusiastically described the ways his father shot women who came to his studio. He emphasised the function of angles and lighting used to make subjects look good in a photograph. For instance, if a woman had a better side profile, the photograph would be taken with her head slightly tilted. He also cited examples of how, through his use of lighting effects and make-up, he transformed women who carried extra weight or did not have pronounced features. I have not been able to access these photographs personally, as Dheeraj no longer has them, but family and friends who lived in this area have attested to his version of this matrimonial photography practice.
The arrival of video engendered a shift in the way media captured the wedding ceremony, particularly its gendered dimension. In his discussion of the binary between acting and posing, David Campany posits acting as a mode associated with a “time-based” medium like cinema, while posing suggests the stillness of photography. The close-up, according to Campany, is an “uncinematic” shot. On the question of the close-up, Laura Mulvey has noted that the close-up arrests time, absorbing and dispersing attention, and soliciting a gaze that is much more fixing and fetishistic than narratively voyeuristic. It is through the close-up that the star persona has historically emerged. Stars are actors who embody more than their performances. They have a sense of being themselves as much as playing their part. The phenomenon of stardom recognises the artifice of cinema. It accepts that there can or will be an excess beyond the part played.
This shift hinges on the relationship between stillness and motion, of posing and acting. If the still photograph freezes an instant and captures the prospective bride in a pose and angle that is flattering, the moving image of analogue video makes her perform femininity for the camera. What links these still and moving mediums is the close-up angle or shot. The close-up captures all the necessary details of the bride’s face, dress, and gestures. One of the prevailing clichés across cultures is that the bride is the star of the wedding day with all eyes focused on her. This star persona is created through wedding photography and videography using the close-up shot creatively. Thus, it is not film but the “uncinematic” medium of analogue video that appeared best suited to capture wedding ceremonies after still photography. Video is inherently a close-up medium. In many interviews with videographers, the camera’s capacity to zoom in and zoom out was lauded for its special quality to capture detail. The zoom lens thus becomes integral to capturing minute details of intimate events. The transition point in the capture of weddings from photography to video is the film camera. It is only fitting to recognize that in this intermedial narrative of marriage videos, a precedent of this close-up and zoom aesthetic was set by the wedding video of Bollywood’s first superstar, filmed on motion picture cameras.
The marriage of Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia, held in 1973, was shot on 16mm. Rajesh Khanna is widely acknowledged as the first Bollywood superstar. Dimple Kapadia was a teen sensation in the 1970s who married Rajesh at the age of sixteen, six months before the release of her debut film, Bobby, which also made her a huge star. A short clip from the wedding survives in a BBC documentary on Khanna.
The clip begins with a medium-long shot of Khanna sitting on a horse, his face covered with a ceremonial turban, swathed with flowers, and surrounded by a band; a wedding party has blocked the streets. The sequence moves to several long shots to give a sense of the size of the wedding party and the band (the framing of almost all the shots is flat and frontal in presentation). The scene shifts to the wedding mandap (or platform) where the bride and groom are seated for the ceremonial rites. Several close-ups show the male star, while we get only one of the back and side profiles of the bride. The sequence then transitions to a close-up of the bride’s face, at which point she either looks away from the camera or bows her head, a gesture that we see repeated by women in early marriage videos. The sequence concludes with their wedding reception, where the couple navigates a frenzied mob to reach the dais to receive blessings and gifts from their guests; this is rendered in a medium shot, interspersed with multiple close-ups of the male star’s face.
The wedding film of Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia set a trend among the wealthy in Delhi to record weddings with 16mm or Super 8 cameras. However, this development evinced little commercial potential, as film stock and camera equipment were available in limited supply and few could afford access to projection facilities. Moreover, developing and processing took time, and labs did not prioritise home movies; for instance, Mahatta, the oldest photography studio in Delhi, boasted in-house black-and-white and colour-processing labs, but I was told that only weddings of employees or those of established clients making special requests were processed. It is only with the advent of analogue video technology in the 1980s that marriage videography spread widely amongst the middle classes.
Marriage videos emerged as a new form of narrative production for wedding ceremonies. These videos had a running time of two or three hours and videographers used video technology to create a distinct form. Marriage videos are usually edited from around six hours of footage. Fragments are selected to construct a coherent narrative. The result is a video structure with archetypical narratives of the wedding as well as a commentary on the narrative through a juxtaposition of selected scenes, images, and audio. The video narrative, thus, has strong links to film narratives of weddings, especially in its incorporation of film songs, plots, images, and aesthetics into a complex structure interwoven with the marriage story.
Excerpted with permission from Video Culture in India: The Analog Era, Ishita Tiwary, Oxford University Press.
