Beauty, much like the lotus,can bloom in the filthiest of settings. This may have been the sentiment that made a couple organise their pre-wedding photo shoot amidst distinctly trashy surroundings: the man and the woman decided to take a dip in a pool of foul water surrounded by plastic and garbage, even managing to exchange a kiss in that wasteland. The internet — that amorphous, opinionated entity which watches over, and is quick to praise or condemn, all human activity — remained a divided house on this antic. Some viewers were apparently shocked by the couple’s choice of the venue: dirt, an anathema to the notion of purity, is seldom associated with pious occasions such as weddings. But other viewers were, apparently, impressed by the shock-value of the image: there is even some speculation that the photo-op could have been the couple’s way of disseminating an environmental message about the threat posed by litter.

Of course, strange settings for photo shoots, a common accompaniment of the modern wedding, are not that uncommon. The images of a bride walking on a potholed road in Kerala had gone viral; a pair of love birds had been photographed slithering among serpents; another couple’s video involved, quite literally, an elephant in the frame, only for the pachyderm to, in a manner of speaking, crash the wedding party — among the injured in this rogue photo shoot were the mahout and the groom who was stripped of his wedding finery.

The demand for unconventional photo-ops has been rising with the spike in the profitability of the wedding mar­ket. According to some estimates, the turnover of the Big Fat Indian Wed­ding business is Rs 30 billion, its size second only to that of its cousin in the United States of America. In­cidentally, a substantial share of this lucrative pie is pocketed by the creators of curated wedding photography. The choice of novel milieus — from muddy waters to rail tracks to historical monuments to animals, no venue is safe from the camera chasing the bride and groom — is an indicator that this burgeoning market needs to thrive — survive — on innovation. What, consequently,gets peddled as creativity or originality in this genre ofphotography is visual evidence of art being tamed by the demands of commerce. Admittedly, this enterprise, much like that slimy pool the couple climbed into, can come with its own risks. Recently, a wedding photographer was asked to pay compensation by an irate groom upon discovering that the former had failed to produce images of the moment of his vivah muhurta.

As a cultural document, the wedding photo shoot reveals the union of consumption and narcissism. Every moment of the self and shared bliss must, therefore, be recorded for mass consumption. Could it be that there is a tinge of wisdom in this collective celebration of self-love? After all, the desire to preserve a moment, through sophisticated technology or any other medium, is fuelled by the knowledge that it — the moment — will, inevitably, pass.