Pakistan's Roadside Prints Sell a Fantasy of Jet Skis and Movie Stars
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. The goal is spectacle and provocation—a quick fantasy, made on the fly and sold for cheap, most often at festivals and large social gatherings across Pakistan.
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. “[It’s] really like a rave—like a primal rave atmosphere.”
Paley kept finding these souvenirs scattered about the festival grounds. He collected a few and took them back to his home in Portugal, where they collected dust on his desk. After a friend became enamored with their creative, rule-breaking energy, Paley gave them a closer look. Soon after, he returned to Pakistan to visit with the creators of these prints and learn more about the craft and intention behind them. The more he learned, the more obsessed he became.
Out today, Jugaar: A Pakistani Guide to Aspirational Living—a book produced by Paley, archivist and photographer Lukas Birk, and curator Zarmeene Shah—is an exploration of the artists and artistry behind these mementos. It offers up waves of images featuring the faces of young men superimposed onto bodies cozied up to Bollywood and Lollywood star actresses; others show couples transported to fancy estates, or a young woman in a soldier’s uniform. It also offers an insightful look at the creators behind these images, such as the father-son duo of Zahid and Zeeshan, whom Paley met in Sehwan Sharif, where they were running a traveling photo studio. Zahid, the father, operates the camera and interfaces with clients and is one of several photographers whose work is featured in Jugaar.
The actual process takes just a few minutes. Customers are given a preset list of backgrounds to choose from. Once they make their selection, a booth operator, like Zahid, snaps their picture. Then Zeeshan speedily works to edit the images and bring the customers’ vision to life, all for a reasonable price, coming out to about a dollar a pop.
“They take your picture—doesn't matter what the backdrop is—they take the SD card, dump it in, two seconds, open it, contour it in two seconds,” Paley says. “And in two seconds the thing is done and printed on this crappy printer, put into a plastic sleeve, and 100 rupees and off you go.”
The clients take the prints home. Maybe they’ll get tacked on the wall of a teenager’s bedroom or a young couple’s living room as a reminder of a fun, fleeting, but meaningful memory. There is an ephemeral nature to them, a brief explosion of artistic liberty and personal escape. For Paley, that energy is where the beauty of the cards is found. Sometimes, he reflects, the sheer act of creation itself yields something more beautiful than the pursuit of perfection.
