„Much of my work is personal, experiential, and purely subjective. There is no urgent story that needs telling and the only truth in it is what I make up along the way. My trip to Addis Ababa was motivated by a simple desire to go some place about which I had very little knowledge and start the process of discovery from virtually zero. This series is the result of a quest for the colour of Africa.“
Mahesh Shantaram is a photographer based in Bangalore and works in the genre of subjective documentary photography, which basically means that instead of being weighed down by the responsibility of ‘telling the truth’, which is virtually impossible in his opinion, he just records his personal experience of an event or situation. He celebrates the everyday, the mundane, the leftovers when all the exotic has been consumed or left to dry. You could call him a soldier in the war against cheesy, predictable, and aww-so-cute imagery. After wasting away in a cubicle in Washington DC, he decided to go to Paris to study photography. When he returned to India in 2006, it was immediately apparent to him that Indian wedding photography as we know it needed some ventilation and that’s how he became one of India’s best-known wedding photographers.
For more of his work please visit:
Mahesh Shantaram – Addis Ababa
