‘Putting a face to rape survivors would make the brutality in such cases more real’
Photographer Anushka Kelkar is the creator of the feminist Instagram project browngirlgazin
A woman’s body is a place of conflict. As soon as she is visible, she becomes public property, shamed for not being pretty enough, blamed for being too sexy, her body a site of fatal — sometimes literally — flaws. Forever watched and judged, women in our society are afraid of taking up space, says photographer Anushka Kelkar, the creator of browngirlgazin, an Instagram project that seeks to overturn the male gaze and flip conventional visual narratives of women’s bodies.
Kelkar not only wants to challenge beauty norms and stereotypes via this project, which she started as a student at Ashoka University, but also to encourage women to celebrate themselves and claim their rightful place in society. She is working on expanding browngirlgazin and is currently shooting in Mumbai.
In this conversation with NewsTracker, she talks about her project, women’s bodies, rape culture and why she thinks survivors could be empowered by no longer being faceless.
I chose to focus on people who identify as women because a lot of my inspiration for this project came from my own experiences as a woman. While I do believe that men, as well as people who do not align with any of these genders, face different kinds of problems regarding their relationships with their bodies, the struggles they grapple with, and the standards which exist for them, are completely separate from those of women. I wanted to document the experiences of women because I felt like I had not seen many portraits of women on Instagram that did not feel curated, or ‘effortlessly perfect’. I want to build a community where women openly discuss their joys, insecurities, and anxieties in relation to their bodies. I don’t think it has been done a lot before.
One of the biggest anxieties that many women I have photographed share is that of taking up too much space, both literally and metaphorically. It is difficult to get them to fill up the frame because allowing oneself to be visible is not something that comes naturally. Women are afraid of unabashedly looking into my camera, and matching the gaze. I think that anxiety stems from constantly being afraid of being watched and policed, both in the private and public sphere.
One of the women who participated in my project told me about how she’s been going to the gym since she was 13. She talked about the pressure her family puts on her to lose weight. That was one shoot that really broke my heart — to hear the kind of insults she heard on a regular basis was shocking. From being told to try and “run a little more,” to being told that she’s unworthy in various ways… I was really startled by how much control people in our society think they have over young women’s bodies.
My posts probably reinforce existing stereotypes, or bring sympathy towards those who speak up. Sometimes even both, simultaneously. While sympathy might arise often because women are highlighting the pressure they feel to match up to these narrow beauty standards, I’m trying to build a community where women can openly discuss these issues without shame. In this process, I’m also discussing the various stereotypes that exist. But in the kind of portraits I take, I try really hard not to re-enforce them.
The whole idea of “she asked for it” comes from the notion that if a woman dresses in a certain way, or looks “sexy,” then she is responsible for being raped. We constantly witness victim blaming in our culture. A woman being confident and comfortable in her own body is seen as an incredibly threatening thing. Stereotypes regarding a woman’s sexual appeal can often be dangerous because they have a very real impact on how seriously a woman is taken when she reports a rape.
I would want to do a photo-series on rape survivors reclaiming their bodies, and speaking about the triumphs and struggles that they have faced post the rape. Rape survivors are defined by the rape in the media. I would like to make portraits to take away the shame and stigma associated with being a survivor. I want to chronicle the ways in which people are constantly working towards being more than the violence that was inflicted upon them, and document their journeys.
Putting up visuals of rape survivors can be extremely challenging. There are so many factors that need to be considered before any image can be published. Obviously, the survivor has to consent to the image being published, but, even after that, they could be uncomfortable sharing their pictures, given the ways in which these images could be manipulated, and made to go viral. It’s also important to remember that because of the stigma that surrounds rape, it could become very difficult to move past it if people recognised their face. I do think representation is important, and visualisations would make the brutality involved in rape cases more real because people can actually associate it with a face. But I also understand the complexities that would come with visualisations.
