Epic photo opportunities on the banks of the Brahmaputra

01 October 2019

Back in the era of Woodstock and Yasgur’s Farm, awareness of India’s great epics — the Mahabharata and the Ramayana — started to seep into the mainstream Western psyche.

Scholars, cultural historians and lettered laypersons of the English-speaking hemisphere have, of course, known and studied these remarkable works since the 19th century, when the first full translations became available. But public awareness of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana was modest. It took until the 1960’s when, fuelled by an appetite for all things Indian and ancient and Sanskrit and mystical, and flavoured just a little perhaps by India’s inexhaustible resources of spaced-out smoking materials, culture-shocked hippies and other Western wanderers started to bring back extraordinary tales of these extraordinary tales from India. They spoke of books of verse, of epic poems of 24,000 stanzas and 1.8 million words, written four centuries before Christ and depicting the scramble for power between awesome forces of good and evil, greed and generosity, pride and humility. And everything else that’s somewhere in the middle.

Few things you have exposed your sensor to can even come close; suddenly, everything else is too tame, too shallow, too meh, too inauthentic.

Travelshooters would love to take you into monasteries where these magnificent works have been studied for centuries, and which continue to explored, venerated, interpreted and celebrated with astonishing commitment. Here, enactments from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are conceived, choreographed, directed and performed in a rare feast for your eyes, your camera and your sense of deep history. Few things you have exposed your sensor to can even come close; suddenly, everything else is too tame, too shallow, too meh, too inauthentic. This is passion and love, in a setting many, many miles from the nearest tourist, waiting for serious photographers who want to shoot the light fantastic.

Surrounded by textures almost as complex as those of the epic Indian poems, where history has left its uninterrupted mark in the patina on walls, in the marks on flagstones and in the gnarled proof-of-age of wooden beams, you’ll have quiet, uninterrupted and exclusive access to these talented dancers and celebrants. Backstage in the make-up rooms all the way to a live private performance for your cameras, we’ll work with you, your way, to turn these blessed photons into unique pieces of photographic art — and in the process, test your own mastery of light and shadow, of exposure and contrast, of noise vs information, of chaos vs beauty. May we have the pleasure of the next dance?

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