Preston Merchant

SAMMA Summit 2008

This past weekend, I photographed the SAMMA Summit 2008, the annual conference for South Asians in Media, Marketing and Entertainment, which was held at the Time Warner Conference Center in Manhattan.  The first night was a cocktail reception at the AICON Gallery.  The conference featured Peter Liguori, Chairman & CEO of Fox Broadcasting Company, who began his keynote by observing that distribution channels began to open when men started depicting naked women -- the point being that content drives distribution.

Here is a slide show of the some of the proceedings:

Postcard from Chennai

In the summer of 2006, I traveled to Chennai to photograph Ravi and Geetha's wedding.  Though Ravi's family lives in Houston and Geetha's family in New Jersey, both sets had originally come from Mylapore.  So the Radhakrishnans and Ramaswamys went back to India for a traditional wedding.  The events took place in a mandapam, a hotel, outside a temple, and in Geetha's grandparents' house, but my photographs revealed nothing of the city of Chennai. 

I was inspired by the scenes in Mira Nair's "Monsoon Wedding" that step away from the plot of the film and capture Delhi at evening -- Chandni Chowk, traffic at dusk, the paper kites above the old part of the city.

So I took a video camera to Marina Beach at evening, when Chennai comes out for a stroll after the heat has broken -- women in bright saris with jasmine in their hair, young couples, old women at fish stalls, kids at game booths, trinket sellers, and ice cream vendors.

I added a soundtrack by Shiv Subramaniam, Geetha's cousin and an accomplished singer of Carnatic music, whom I had recorded.  So here is a video postcard from Chennai.