Perilous Beauty: Megha Singha On India’s Influencer Culture

In 2019, writer Jia Tolentino proclaimed in her essay in The New Yorker that we were living in an era of the ‘Instagram face’. She would go on to list out a series of facial features that hold the power of reproducibility across digital screens. "Young, of course," she almost shrugs as she writes, "with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and big cartoonish lashes; it has a small neat nose and full, lush lips". Almost ten years later, it’s the same stare that gazes back when Mumbai-based influencer Sarah Honda looks up at photographer Megha Singha’s lens as she taps away at the piano with delicious cherry red nails — a content creator’s ring light in the mirror on her rear, shattering the illusion.

The reason we’re seeing these features return, Tolentino adds, is because they’re carefully curated for digital lives to look their very best when viewed on an iPhone held "aloft at forty-five degrees". Singha’s series titled ‘I Love my Friends but they are Killing Me’, where the photographer’s introspection on everyday ideals of beauty, in hyperglobalised Mumbai, has earned her a nomination at this year’s Aperture Portfolio Prize. The 30-year-old photographer, mentored by the likes of Ashish Shah, Brianna Capozzi and Andrew Vowles, works across fashion and culture in the city; where she photographed young influencers in their own apartments, furnished with large mirrors and other paraphernalia of creator lives, fitted into portable boxes, perhaps difficult to imagine four decades ago.

Singha first started wondering about the changing perceptions of beauty in India while growing up and being around her mother. "She would partly dye her hair blonde and wear blue lenses," she smiles as we both recall being captivated by cool mums showing up after school in winged eyeliner and thick sunglasses. "We also switched cities a lot, and I feel this was her way of renewing herself each time. My father would be confused, but I started seeing beauty a certain way because of her," she says.

Learning that her mother had been influenced by Kim Kardashian into getting the vampire facial — which she gets done to this day — led her to introspect more deeply. Cultural critic Philippa Snow would take Tolentino’s argument further in Trophy Lives (2024), writing: "It’s also possible for us to see celebrities themselves as artists, and their faces and bodies as their work. If we were to use this as a concept, rather than wanting our stars to be relatable… it follows that we could enjoy them for exactly what they are: tirelessly constructed and finessed objects of art, each living in the service of his or her own creation by presenting themselves in the best possible light". Growing up looking up to her mother, it doesn’t seem unnatural to Singha when creator Nandini Dham is open about getting lip fillers at 15 or someone else she photographed wants surgery on their knees.

When Singha started working on another series two years ago, exploring how femininity is constructed and performed in a rapidly changing India, she called it ‘Roller Skating on the Lotus Pond’, referring to a divine miracle almost — albeit through the language of camp. In her photographs, creator Rhea Gupta’s skin glows a celestial blue, her LED mask lying innocently on her bed, while Shloka Birla (industrialist Yash Birla’s daughter) reaches out to a floating bubble as if she’d conjured it herself, and wants to burst it. In this illusionary world, anything could happen — Swarovski could start selling bedsheets as Dham lies on a counterfeit version — and Gupta could magically guess her zodiac. "It was a little insane," she exclaims.

Singha’s work doesn’t undermine the influencer bubble, but adds another layer to its glittery stratosphere, leading us to an inner sanctum of kitschy plushies, childhood illustrations and polaroids marking friendships over the years. "It felt a bit like dating them," admits Singha who texted the influencers after checking their socials and was intensely aware of the intimacy and trust while entering their world in a city where residents live in compact spaces. Leafing through Sofia Coppola Archive (2023), where markers of celebrity personas clashed playfully and ironically with the everyday, Singha photographs another girl standing beside her television playing scenes from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). "I admire Pushpamala N.’s self-portraits," shares Singha, "where it’s so different from documentary work in the subcontinent, generating a certain kind of image".

In one of the most intriguing photographs in the series, Singha rethinks the idea of who holds power in the creation of an influencer’s image by tinkering with German visual artist Rebecca Horn’s ideas. In her work 'Rooms of Mutual Destruction', Horn plays with the image of two rival pistols shooting at each other with projectiles that melded together in a mutual ‘kiss of death’. Similarly, in Singha’s photograph, Dham lies on her bed, seemingly disassociating as she holds a tripod fitted with a toy gun aimed towards her, which becomes a strange alibi for the camera. While one would assume it echoes the parasocial relationship between celebrity and fame, Singha instead presents an alternate take on hypersexualised moments like in Michelangelo Antonioni’s thriller Blowup (1966), where the male photographer straddles a female model, who then, incidentally, captures a murder through his camera. Through a plastic plaything Dham takes control, mimicking ‘shooting’ her own image while freezing a moment of herself in perpetuity — needing the camera as desperately as it needs her.

While Singha’s theatrical image titles like ‘You Have Ruined Our Family’ might suggest otherwise, she laughs, talking about how she would watch hours of reality shows and borrow from their dramatic titles, interplaying text with image — something she wants to explore in her practice. It becomes more about how the young women work around societal barriers like families who have no idea of their influencer desires, or judgement from men online — which Singha herself faced when she started posting the photographs.

In the end, this story returns to mothers from whose closets these women borrowed cheetah-printed jackets and iridescent shoes after being convinced to bring their own selves to the shoot by stylist Rupangi Grover, Singha’s friend and collaborator. "My mom is just this amazing, cool, funny girl who I thought of more like a best friend," says Gupta, who, like influencer Asfa Sinha, grew up with and was inspired by her mother, who modelled. "I remember being excited to get picked up from school as she’d have the best outfit on. Afterwards we’d go for a drive listening to her CDs," Gupta says. As Singha shuttles between the Northeast, Bombay and the rest of India for realising her personal projects, she looks forward to working with her own mother, who was a model and acted in Bishnupriya Manipuri films, and has been a bit of a momager figure throughout much of her work. "She’s always sending recommendations for shoot locations," laughs Singha, "Much like the girls I photograph who keep giving me tips for social media — which is great!"

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