Finding the Bergerson residence is pretty easy. Situated in the idyllic village of Assagao, the blue and white Portuguese styled house presents a pretty picture. Here we are greeted with a warm smile by Shefi, wife of Sephi (the similarity in names is just a coincidence as it was love at first sight where they met at a cloth store in Israel).
Hailing originally from Poland, the Israeli photographer has toured almost half the world having lived in Tel Aviv Israel, New York City, San Francisco, Paris. It was in early 2002 that after more than 10 years as an advertising and commercial photographer, Sephi chose to move to India with his wife and their 10 month old baby to follow his dream to be a documentary photographer. In 2012, he moved to Goa and has since remained involved in various projects. His recent book Behind the Indian Veil-A Journey through Weddings in India which published in August 2015 was launched in Goa in March this year.
“We were just finishing up with the Street Food of India book in 2007, when a friend of mine requested me to shoot the wedding of her sister in Kerala. I told her I am not a wedding photographer but she insisted I try to be one here,” recalls Bergerson. Amused, Bergerson later joked with his publisher that his next book would be on weddings. His publisher however jumped at the idea and began putting things together that would be interesting for Bergerson to cover.
With recession hitting him late 2008, Bergerson began to find that his assignments were suffering and eventually his projects shifted from personal to commercial. “That is how I started taking up wedding projects on a commercial scale because that was giving me a lot of money specially during the time when I needed it. Although wedding was not the only thing that I was doing but it was taking a lot of time,” narrates Bergerson.
His first project was shooting a Tamil Brahmin wedding, a shoot that was suggested to him by an event planner with whom he had shared the idea of a wedding photography book.
“I was totally ignorant of the wedding affairs. The day started at 6’o clock in the morning and the ceremony went on for four continuous hours. I was like a mad man at the wedding but, ultimately, I was doing the project for myself and I got the right frames that I wanted. I got to capture the various emotions during the weddings and that’s what I wanted to compile through this book,” Bergerson states as he flips through the pages of his book.
Behind The Indian Veil features images and written stories from a vast assortment of Indian communities: Tamil Brahmin, Bengali, Sikh, Hindu, Punjabi, Hyderabadi Muslim, Rajput, Kashmiri Pandit, Ladakhi Buddhist, Goan Catholic, Syrian Christian, Zoroastrian Parsi, Dawoodi Bhora and Kodava Coorg. When asked about approaching Princess Diya Kumari of Rajasthan to write the foreword, Bergerson says, “every bride is a princess on her wedding day. What better foreword than having it from the real Princess herself”.
Amidst the new experiences at weddings, Bergerson encountered another section of wedding photographers who worked on the projects awarded to them by the wedding couple.
“In the struggle to capture every moment of the wedding, the couple and family is harassed by the photographers. The wedding is all about the photographers as they are all over the place making the couple pose, smile, capturing the relatives, making the family pose with artificial backgrounds etc,” he laments. To illustrate this constant at weddings, Bergerson selected one such picture for his book which featured a bright green movable fan in the frame along with the couple and the photographer. “The couple (who travelled all the way from UK for the wedding ceremony) was furious and wanted an explanation for this selection. And my explanation was simple. This has been the major part of the wedding as it was there through out the ceremony. This is the essence of an Indian wedding,” he says.
While Bergerson asserts that weddings have made a positive impact in his life he continues to take other corporate assignments.
“India has been at the centre of my life. I am a documentary photographer and what better place than Goa. Change is coming up here but still lots more needs to be done to clean up the mess and the garbage. Although so much is talked about Goa being a wedding destination, it is very cheap. It’s like going for a Scorpio which is the lower end model in the XUVs than a higher end. There are a few grand weddings happening here but most weddings scheduled are mainly to save on the expenditure. Not all book me for their wedding day but for those who do I definitely do not help them save anything,” smiles Bergerson, whose project bookings start from 3 lakhs 15 thousand onwards.
