Day 9: Visual Representations of Gender-Based Violence

On the ninth day of the 2022 Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender-Based Violence, photographers Vidya Kulkarni and Priyadarshini Ravichandran, aimed to answer the question "What are appropriate ways to represent gender-based violence visually?", in a session facilitated by Dr. Philippa Williams, Queen Mary University of London. Click here to watch a saved video of the discussion.

This discussion is part of the project Surviving Violence: Everyday resilience and gender justice in rural-urban India funded by the British Academy Heritage Dignity and Violence Programme HDV190009. Research partners: Queen Mary University of London, Chaitanya-The Policy Consultancy, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Nari Samata Manch and University of Oxford. 

"If you Google domestic violence images, you will come across images that sensationalise physical violence, depicting bruised and battered women and posing male aggressors to be carrying a belt in their hand...In the brief, we invited photographers to make photos that did not sensationalise violence or show women as battered and bruised victims of violence....The photography and the practice and process behind the photos that has come out of our interaction together, we will be discussing on this panel today.", said Dr. Philippa Williams, introducing the photographers of the discussion, Vidya Kulkarni and Priyadarshini Ravichandran.

Vidya Kulkarni:

• "Photography, as a component, was appealing to me, because we all know the power of visuals and how strongly they communicate, especially in this time when a lot of visuals are consumed, more than the texts. But, though we know the power of visuals, our feminist movements contain mostly women's texts. Therefore this conscience obtained of this project to work with the photographers is really important."
• "Violence, as it is, remains invisible. And, within that, surviving strategies are also invisible. So, to focus on them visually is a really good idea. And, I think, there is a need for more such collaborative efforts and to create gender-sensitive visuals, if you want to offset the stereotypical images around gender in the mainstream and other media."
• "With this understanding - focusing on emotion, and focusing on domestic space, I took the photographs."

• "This photo, I feel that, women are always in the background. What they feel, and what they think is also not in the forefront, and it is in the background. Their happiness and well-being is judged from the outer change, the façade....when you actually are in the field, you work with whatever is in front of you; you create images from that. So, it is not like one has a fixed idea before going to the field. One has to be open to whatever is in front of you, and it is surprising because you can get unexpected results." (photograph on the right)

• "I felt, while reading the stories, that while women go through abuse and violence, they are thinking about the options. It is not that they are mutely at the receiving end. But, they do think, while they carry on their routine, everyday activities." (photograph on the left)
  

Priyadarshini Ravichandran:

• "It was also important for me to hear that their research and writing were about the heavy silence about gendered violence. That, sort of, really initiated this work for me. The conversations really made me understand that, yet again, I just needed to follow where the medium of photography was leading me to, rather than me making very thoughtful choices. So, I took on this challenge to enter something that was relatively unknown to me."
• "All of the stories they shared, their anger, their fears, their empathy and conviction towards the need for challenging patriarchy and deepening the understanding towards intimate violence really shook me. And, it somehow directly connected me to my own inner feminine self and the capacity of this inner self to hear what is unsaid, to see the invisible and feel what is not just my own lived experiences, but of a collective, powerful whole. This really gripped me."
• "My process was to go intuitively to places that communicated what is left and heard, what is mute when very loud, and I let myself be absorbed."

Adding to the discussion, Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan, pointing at the photograph on the right, mentioned that, "this one, for example, I am not sure where she took the photo, but to me, it looks like the outside of a temple - the cloth is silk, all sorts of things are bundled but the bundle is going nowhere. And, you know, the fact that it is such a big package speaks of the burden that survivors are carrying but they have nowhere to go, the package is too heavy, and they are stranded in a place that no one wants to claim. This literally looks like the middle of nowhere" 

About Dr. Philippa Williams: Philippa is a Reader/Associate Professor in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research is animated by everyday politics of the state, citizenship, violence/non-violence in India as well as the geopolitics of digital privacy through the case of WhatsApp. She currently leads two main projects “Surviving Violence: Everyday resilience and gender-justice in rural-urban India” www.survivingviolence.org and “The politics of WhatsApp” http://www.whatsapppolitics.org/