I just read about The Darshan Project in Yoga Magazine and had to post about it!
There’s something so compelling about photographer Manjari Sharma’s artistic vision. I was instinctively drawn to it because I knew it was a form of communion. When I watched her video about the project, she mentioned how she grew up in India, visiting the temples with all the depictions of the deities. She remarked that when she came to the US to get her MFA in Photography, she began to visit all the museums here.
She notes that museums in the US are the temple.
You know what else is cool about this?
She put it out there on Kickstarter to get it funded. Over 400 people supported her vision to donate to the cause. So this is a personal vision, (Darshan means vision), but one that is being brought to fruition by community.
So I love her work, partly because I’m newly enamored with photography, but I’m also in love with it because of the immediacy of the work. Unlike digital collage, (my other passion du jour!), her images are elaborately created scenes. Photoshop and digital manipulation would be so much easier, (and far less expensive), to create. But these are complex and real.
It’s kind of like watching a movie with elaborate sets and being delighted that it’s not CGI, which for me just doesn’t have the same impact.
There’s something very powerful in the creation of such large scale and elaborate work brought into the world by a visionary and fostered by a community of people that value art and spirituality.
I think her work is a kind of ‘Artistic Communion’.
And now for an unapologetic pun…go ahead with the drum roll….. it’s divine!
