“One’s wedding is an intimate event in
their life and when there is a big production, it loses out on its intimacy and
becomes impersonal. For my book, I enjoyed clicking at the small family
weddings more than the lavish ones,” says Sephi Bergerson, a documentary
photographer who has made Goa his home for the last four years. Sitting in the
verandah of his home in Parra, surrounded by the pristine beauty of lush green
fields, Sephi opens up about his book ‘Behind the Indian Veil – A Journey
Through Weddings in India’, which he has dedicated to his wife of 16 years,
Shefi.
The coffee table book documents beautiful
images of Indian traditional weddings in all earnestness. With 108 photographs,
the weddings are unique and make Sephi feel proud of his work. “After the
release of my first book in India – ‘Street Food of India’ – a friend asked me
what will be my next project and I jokingly said ‘weddings’. But things just fell
into place. Before travelling to Kerala for a friend’s sister’s wedding, I
clicked for a traditional wedding in Tamil Nadu, my first project for the book.
From there on, I covered the whole of India, from North to South,” says Sephi.
The weddings captured in the book include a Ladhaki Buddhist wedding, a Kodava
wedding in Coorg, and a mass wedding of 340 couples of the Dawoodi Bhora in
Mumbai.
With a thousand printed copies of the book
to be launched on August 29, 2015 in Delhi at the hands of Dr Shashi Tharoor,
Sephi is delighted with the response he has received before the release. “As
the book is self-published through crowdfunding, I had the full freedom to
produce the book the way I wanted. From the 1000 books that have been printed,
150 are signed books and 200 are special edition copies. There will also be a
six-page spread in Verve magazine with photographs from the book,” he adds.
The book, printed at Pragati Printers,
Hyderabad, will be featured at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2015 in October. “I started
the crowdfunding project last September and it did well because my previous
book, ‘Street Food of India’, had won awards that convinced people that I can
deliver. Tania Das Gupta designed the book and saw it from an editor’s
perspective,” says Sephi who used three Nikon cameras to cover the project.
Picking just 108 photographs from 50,000
wasn’t an easy task for Sephi, but he is happy with the end result. “I find
weddings visually amazing and each shot is photogenic. I selected photographs
that would best depict the variety of rituals involved in traditional Indian
weddings. The book features nearly a 100 weddings and I want it to be a
conversation opener when people talk about Indian weddings,” he says.
With all the talk about weddings, Sephi’s
wife, Shefi, pipes in, sharing memories of their own wedding. “We were living
in Tel Aviv, Israel but we came down for a month to Delhi where I got my red
sari stitched and Sephi got his sherwani. We had an Indian wedding in Israel
with our family and friends. We had a ‘baraat’, ‘mehendi’, ‘tika’ and gulab
jamun for the guests.” The couple, who has been living in India for the past 14
years, is now blessed with three daughters, Liah and twins Eva and Amber.
‘iKenya’ is Sephi’s new book project which
has been shot, edited and processed entirely on the iPhone while on a safari in
Kenya. One photograph of the project has
already won the first place in the ‘Animals’ category at the IPPAWARDS, an
annual iPhone photography competition.
