Pakistan's Roadside Prints Sell a Fantasy of Jet Skis and Movie Stars
Detailed summary
Photographer Matthieu Paley spent five years collecting souvenir cast-offs from festivals and pilgrimages—and found beauty in their reveries.
Photographer Matthieu Paley spent five years collecting souvenir cast-offs from festivals and pilgrimages—and found beauty in their reveries.
The prints are bombastic and kitschy by design. Their creators take a standard background, say Arches National Park, and paste in a tough-guy motorcycle, then a man on top of that motorcycle. Then the image is brought to life on an ink-jet printer, the final result often a bit flimsy, with printer lines still visible. Precision is not the point.
When photographer and National Geographic Explorer Matthieu Paley first stumbled across the prints in 2021, he didn’t make much of them. He was in Sehwan Sharif, a small city in southern Pakistan, to visit and document an annual festival celebrated by a liberal sect of Islam in remembrance of the 13th-century Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. “The noise level, everything is mental,” Paley says.
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