The Other Side Of Magnetic Fields - A Photo Narrative

“At every festival there are the untold stories away from the spotlight and the music,” observe photographers Shreya Dev Dube and Richard Wyndham, recalling last December’s Magnetic Fields Festival. Most three-day-long music festivals across India (and beyond) tend towards more formulaic showcasings. Excited crowds, hordes of people in neon hand-bands clutching their intoxicants in plastic cups, wide smiles and a sense of everlasting energy and vibrancy. Instagram and Snapchat are then flooded with smiles and poses with stage celebrities—perfectly manufactured images tell stories of the night. But that’s only one side of the story.

Amongst the lively and animated experiences that fill these music festivals are smaller moments that we rarely get to experience unless you’re waist-deep in it yourself. “They are the 7 am moments after three days or very little sleep that shed light on elements of ourselves that we had not come across before,” Dube explains. Post all-night debauchery and endless hours of music, dawn tends to bring with it a softness and an honesty. In the case of this festival, the crisp, chilly morning breeze of Rajasthan’s desert might make you wrap yourself in a cosy blanket, and you find like-minded people to watch the sun rise with. As the photographers of this series put it best, “They are usually experienced with a group of friends that are bond together by the hunt for joy. Sometimes, however, this has its side effects, such as the occasional member of your group ringing up his mother just to hear her soothing voice or the one that decided not to sleep and is now eating sand.”

The morning hours of a music festival are drenched in the exhaustion of the night before, and portray a raw truth in the sunlight. As 8 am walks through the Magnetic Fields ground and its people will show you, “It’s as if they had all been frozen by absolute intoxication while they battle for an unforgettable experience,” Dube signs off.

Scroll on for Shreya Dev Dube and Richard Wyndham’s evocative series on ‘The Other Side Of Magnetic Fields.’ A tribute to the dawn-soldiers and the photographs that rarely, if ever, make it to anyone’s instagram feeds.