Italian traveler and photographer Federico Carpani has been in India since 2008. He has travelled
the whole country and felt there is some life in death in the famous Manikarnika
Ghat where the Hindu dead are cremated following all rituals. This, being a
seemingly interesting fact Carpani selected spirituality and the disturbing
facts of Hindu gods, goddess, life and death and their rituals for his book.
Pointing to the Indian connection
of the book Maa, Carpani selected images
from the vast body (10,000) of photos by Indra Jha who simultaneously is a Kali
temple keeper and a self taught photographer at the Varanasi Ghats. Jha
captures the photos of death, cremation and other happenings and sells them for
a fee to anybody who is interested in taking them.
The two met at Manikarnika which resulted
in Maa. Carpani said after he had
published the book that, “When I met Indra first, he was just
shooting and printing. So, we had to start afresh with creating a backup of all
the pictures.”
Carpani’s book unwraps layers of the
Varanasi city featuring images of rituals, spirituality and the stereotypical
images of romanticized belief. Though a seemingly disturbing topic, displaying Goddess
Kali on the front cover wearing 108 human skulls, Carpani justifies this as
natural once you belong to those places.
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