In Darshan, Manjari Sharma turns the camera toward a subject usually encountered as sculpture, pigment, or carved stone. The book gathers nine four-color plates made for Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, each a photographically constructed representation of a Hindu god or goddess central to mythological narrative. The title comes from Sanskrit, where darshan names the act of seeing and being seen by the divine—an apparition, a glimpse. Sharma’s project asks whether a photograph can hold that charged exchange, and what is gained or lost when a three-dimensional object of worship becomes a two-dimensional image.

The work grew from displacement. Having left a ritual-driven community in India for the United States, Sharma described a cultural paralysis that pushed her to use the camera as her own medium of worship, studying and then rebuilding the mythologies of her homeland. Her broader portraiture addresses identity, multiculturalism, and personal mythology, concerns that meet here in a deliberate act of reconstruction: memory, sculpture, and ornament translated into photographic form.

What distinguishes the book is its economy. Sixteen pages, hardcover, nine plates, and a single signed original photograph bound in—this is an argument compressed into an object, not a survey. Sharma works within the devotional image rather than around it, testing the photograph’s capacity for spiritual engagement while keeping the viewer’s gaze central. For a serious collector, the interest lies in that conceptual clarity, in a photographer using one medium to interrogate the rituals of another, and in a format that makes the sequence feel complete. A book this concentrated repays slow, repeated looking.