Cooler than your selfie stick: This Mumbai couple is shooting glamorous, nostalgic family portraits

You could almost see the sepia tone – a woman wearing a nine-yard sari stood smiling beside a gramophone. She was accompanied by her husband, who was dressed in a dhoti coupled with a classic Maharashtrian coat. The scenery behind them was hand painted, and they made a handsome pair. As the woman changed back into her dress and sneakers, the photographer connected his digital camera to a computer so he could email them the portrait.

The couple was one of several families that visited The Old World Photo Studio at the Piramal Gallery, in Mumbai’s National Centre for Performing Arts, earlier this month. To celebrate World Photography Day on August 18, Mumbai-based photographer Shirish Karrale and his wife Varsha Karrale invited families to pose for portraits in their traditional attire. The project was open to participants for three days, over the course of which Karrale, Varsha and their assistants photographed over 75 families.

No airbrushed beauties

Karrale, who works at an advertising firm, said he had photographed several celebrities and models through his career, but felt the desire to capture portraits of regular people because of a chance comment by his wife. “She said to me, ‘Your models and slim and trim, but what about normal women?’ I decided that I wanted to capture the phenomenon that we refer to as Indian beauty,” said Karrale. “And then a picture was brought to me for retouching, which was from the 1960s. I have always been fond of old pictures, especially the ones taken by Raja Deen Dayal. So I wondered why we don’t shoot pictures like this anymore,” he said.

Karrale first decided to design a traditional photo studio and shoot pictures of people clad in traditional attire in 2010. He studied hundreds of old pictures to replicate the outfits that people wore when they visited photo studios. “I had to see if people wore shawls or angarakhas, what kind of caps they wore and how they dressed up when they went to a studio for a portrait,” he said. To imitate the pleasant, nostalgic aesthetic of the photo studios, he hunted for antique chairs, old carpets and gramophones.

When the experimental shoot churned out satisfactory pictures, Karrale first decided to open his project to the public at the Kala Ghoda Fest in 2011. The operation was similar to the one at the NCPA – he was assisted by his wife Varsha, who is a commercial artist and curator. At a studio designed by the couple, visitors changed into traditional clothes and posed for portraits. The participants left their e-mail addresses with Karrale, who processed the images and sent them digital copies.

“For the photo studio in Kala Ghoda, we created a small green room, and people would get ready within 15 minutes,” Varsha said. “We clicked pictures of around thousand families in those nine days, and people really appreciated the concept.”

This was how the couple decided to replicate the concept for The Old World Photo Studio at the NCPA. They provided participants with stitched nine-yard sarees and dhotis, along with appropriate accessories like bags and caps and the studio was slightly modified.

“Although we announced that it was meant to be a family portrait with people wearing their traditional dresses, we kept some clothes ready,” Varsha said. “To my surprise, I found that many people were not aware about how to drape a normal saree, how to take the pallu, or even what a mangalsutra is,” said Varsha.

Varsha was also pleasantly surprised when she encountered families that had preserved their traditional jewellery and clothes, some of which they claimed were over a hundred years old. “Some people had maintained their great-grandparents’ jewellery so beautifully, the jewels had been kept apart from their usual, everyday ornaments,” said Varsha. “The families proudly demonstrated how each ornament was meant to be worn. I learnt so many things from them.”

Dressing up in their traditional clothes gave the participants an opportunity to become acquainted with objects that are considered part of their cultural heritage. For instance, Varsha also provided interested participants with a Maharashtrian nath, the nose-pin that is traditionally worn by women on auspicious occasions.

Apart from Maharashtrian families, who came wearing “tremendously rich and well-preserved old nine-yard sarees,” Varsha noted that many Gujarati, Sindhi and Bengali families also visited the studio dressed in grand traditional attires. “We didn’t want to put any restriction on the kind of clothes the people wore, so I had the opportunity to be proud of the variety of people that live in India,” she said.

Family photographs are irreplaceable fragments of personal and social history, not only because they are emphatic testaments to a specific way of life, but also because they are treasured over several generations. The Old World Photo Studio allowed participants to experience a portion of the personal histories that they had preserved over decades, and also create tangible memories for posterity.

Karrale remarked that projects like this give him tremendous personal satisfaction. “People enjoying photography is very important to me,” he said.

Posing for family portraits at a studio was once an elaborate social activity. Although the traditional family portrait has now been replaced by group selfies, Karrale said that he hoped to remind people of the charm of studio photography. “Very few people are really interested in carefully posed family portraits now,” he said. “This was just a very good opportunity for families to come together and shoot beautiful pictures.”