Artist Statement
I'm Mahesh Shantaram, a photographer from Bangalore, India. I work in the genre of subjective documentary photography, which basically means that instead of making myself useful to the world (or to a magazine) by shooting to their brief, I instead document my personal experience of wonderful people and places that I encounter in the journey of life. I celebrate the everyday, the mundane, the leftovers when all the exotic has been consumed or left to dry.
Process Statement
I walk around and take pictures.
Mahesh Shantaram is an independent photographer based in Bangalore, India.
After a childhood spent growing up in Kuwait was rudely interrupted by the Gulf War in 1991, he finished his schooling and a obtained a degree in Computer Electronics from St. Joseph’s College of Arts & Science, Bangalore. He went on to work as a technology journalist and travel writer, and his last days in the corporate world were spent slaving away in a desk job in Washington, DC. He quit that job in 2005 to pursue a diploma in photography at the Speos Institute, Paris and has been an independent photographer ever since.
Mahesh Shantaram's primary interest lies in using personal and subjective documentary photography to study complex systems, societies, and institutions, particularly with reference to contemporary India. He has portrayed the transition of Bangalore from garden city to technopolis (Steady State 2012), an air traveler’s equivalent of stopping to smell the roses (Airtime), and the charged up political landscape preceding India’s historic 2014 general elections (Last Days of Manmohan).
But, by far, Shantaram's best-known work is Matrimania, a fictional photo series about Indian society seen through the prism of its wedding culture. Matrimania was seen at the Sony World Photography Awards 2011 (3rd Prize, Arts & Culture), Photoquai 2011, PhotoPhnomPenh 2012, Delhi Photo Festival 2013, Addis Photo Festival 2014, and Chobi Mela 2015. In the past couple of years, his work has received international attention in magazines such as the New York Times, Financial Times, Sunday Times, Liberation, Le Monde, and The National.
Mahesh Shantaram was listed in the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch 2015.
How to use our image viewer
Click on any of the thumbnail images to launch the viewer. You can then navigate forward and backward within the portfolio by clicking the left or right side of the enlarged image. Click the add to collection checkbox to automatically add an image to your collection. Image tags or search engine keywords appear below the collections' checkbox and each word or phrase is a link to potentially more image matches.