Romancing the Drone: The Vertical Imagination in Indian Wedding Photography

While much scholarly attention has been paid to the drone’s eye, comparatively little attention has been paid to the desire to be seen by a drone. In India, where consumer drones have been largely inaccessible and heavily regulated till 2021, an understanding of the aesthetic register and social context of drone footage is nascent. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in 2017–2018, this chapter combines a close reading of drone wedding videos and interviews with wedding photographers in New Delhi, India. I trace the mode of romance and desire in the human-machine relationships between photographers and their clients that arise from the intermediality between Bollywood romances and wedding videos. Taking up Robert Campbell’s concept of drone “kinocentrism”, or the normalisation of cinematic visuality in everyday life via the drone shot, the chapter argues that drone wedding videos borrow aesthetic conventions from romantic song-and-dance sequences in cinema to elevate their subjects into romantic protagonists, belying the conservative circumstances of arranged marriage in India. In doing so, I extend the work of feminist scholars who examine the representation of gender and class relations in wedding commemorations, as well as media studies approaches to the intimacy generated by the drone camera.