Bithika Roy Choudhary (Naani), Handpainted archival print, 2021

Interview by Yukta Taneja

Yukta Taneja: Why “Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl”?

Cheryl Mukherji: I love to look at family albums. In mine, I have grown up seeing photographs from my mother’s life and becoming through various phases. Each of these phases appear and reappear as sub-archives in my family albums. One of these sub-archives is her matrimonial photographs, made once every year–over six years–to aid her arranged marriage when she was as old as me. In the photographs, I find a resemblance between my looks and my mother’s. This physical resemblance (and photography) feel synonymous with fate: if I already looked like her, then I must become her.

Inspired by my mother's matrimonial photographs, I reimagine the legacy and tradition of matrimonial photography by staging portraits in my domestic space that often evoke Indian photo studios. I visualize my body in scenes that are playful, exaggerated, and mundane restagings of my mother’s photographs, focussing on refusal and resistance. “Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl” was taken from a classified matrimonial advertisement in an Indian newspaper where families sought a match for their single sons and daughters.

Classifields Matrimonial, Silkscreen on newsprint, 2022

Yukta Taneja: In what ways do you think your series reinterprets the age-old concept of matrimonial photography?

Cheryl Mukherji: I am deeply interested in researching and tracing photographic legacies and conventions pertaining to women in photo studios–from being a subject of the colonial gaze of empire, science, and the state to being portrayed in postured performances for arranged marriages. In my practice, I try to create disruptions in and resist the idea of prescribed femininity, domesticity, and desire. I do this by re-entering the family album by staging self-portraits– focussing on refusal as practice and centering play and humor in everyday domestic performances.

Yukta Taneja: How did “re-entering” the family albums make you feel?

Cheryl Mukherji: Vulnerable at first and gradually empowered. I say so because I like to think of family albums as manifestos of families, where photographs portray the values, order, hierarchy, and chronology of events and members. It is often the gaze of the head of the family–and in extension patriarchy–that constructs this manifesto.

When I started staging self-portraits in my domestic space for this work, I thought about whose gaze I was embodying. I thought about what values, order, and hierarchy I would portray in order to create a counter-manifesto or a manifesto of care. It was vulnerable because I was learning to look at myself and it gradually became (is becoming) empowering because I am learning to look at myself tenderly.