Picture Perfect
Five women who are telling stories through photographs
“Documenting life sensitises you”
Tattoos, quirky shoes, make-up sessions on-themove, pals donning identical clothes, an acid attack victim hiding her scars, cat fights and festivities—these familiar sights on Mumbai local ladies compartment are what Anushree Fadnavis picked for her series of photographs on Instagram. Titled Train
Diaries, her photographs capture the pulse of Mumbai, a city that famously calls the railways its lifeline. With 96,000 followers on her Instagram page and 700 images clicked on her phone, Fadnavis finds interesting stories and forges friendships aboard the local train. “The ladies compartment is a melting pot of stories and emotions; a second home for most where they make friends, cry their heart out, gossip, chop vegetables, finish work, celebrate festivals and even do their make-up,” says the photojournalist who works with a news agency in Mumbai.
Like most children growing up in Mumbai, trains have been an inseparable part of Fadnavis’ life—she remembers fearfully boarding a packed compartment of the Borivali local with her mother to visit relatives in Dadar and Santacruz. She’s seen her parents rush against time to catch the train to work every morning and waited long hours when the trains stopped during heavy rains. So,
when she started travelling to work in 2013, she picked up her camera to document life on the Mumbai local. “It was meant to be a personal memoir where I could remember people I met on the train,” she says. Soon her evocative pictures and the stories they tell struck a chord with fellow Instagrammers and Fadnavis continues to add to the collection.
“I engage people in a conversation because every picture has a story,” says Fadnavis. She’s clicked a young girl who wears clothes with vibrant images of cupcakes and ice creams, chatted with a teenager suffering from Albinism, a congenital disorder, who sits in a corner of the compartment and made friends with a transgender who happily poses for pictures in her favourite saris. “Everyone has a story. Each time I photograph these women and talk to them, it helps me put things into perspective. I’ve learnt to empathise with people and be thankful for what I have. Documenting life sensitises you,” she says.
I“Photographs play the role of the cultural police”
n 2010, designer and photographer Anusha Yadav set up the world’s first public visual archive of the Indian sub-continent, The Indian Memory Project
(IMP), which documents history and culture through photographs. The website now has 175 entries sent in from people across the world telling of life in the sub-continent before 1990. “Photographers play the role of the cultural police,” says Yadav. Every photographer is in a sense documenting something and although photographs on her website are always accompanied by essays, the images are revealing in their own way. “Status, power, beauty, vanity, representation, identity—so much is revealed through a photograph,” she says. Yadav has been deeply interested and involved in documenting culture both through her curation of photographs and stories of personal histories as well as through her own photographic endeavours. Her series of self-portraits sees her as dressing up iconic women of the past from Nur Jahan to Mata Hari. When she first started IMP, she was trying to convince companies and brands to archive their materials. The project was meant as a way to prove that her theory could be put into practice. “I thought 50 people would love it, but didn’t expect five million visitors,” she says. Seven years down the line, the project is used as an academic resource. Her research for IMP has led her to numerous other projects. In March this year, she exhibited ‘The Photograph is Proof ’, a collection of photographs that throw light on a few criminal investigations in India. In July, just before the 70th Indep-endence Day celebrations kick off across the country, she will commemorate the occasion—through a repository of photographic biographies of people in the Indian film industry before the 1950s.
Photographer, writer and filmmaker Tunali Mukherjee was a reluctant Instagrammer two years ago. She soon found herself encouraged to see the world within the app’s square frame and the trees of Mumbai became her biggest inspiration. Walking around the city, she realised that the trees were fighting battles of their own and began to document their fight with urbanisation. “It seemed like a silent war between the city and the trees. People would build walls around the trees, or lay down roads or sheets of cement on top of their roots, but the roots and branches would fight their way out. Muscle memory taught me to skip over the roots when I walked down the footpaths, and I realised I’d been taking these trees for granted for so long,” says Mukherjee.
Over the years, she has taken over 50 photos which she quite unintentionally began archiving under the hashtag ‘Bombay Trunks’. The South Mumbai resident deeply troubled by the construction of the Mumbai Metro and their decision to chop down more than 5,000 trees around Colaba as well as Aarey Milk Colony, aims at a more concerted effort now that at least
“Trees have been fighting battles of their own with urbanisation”
three of the trees she has photographed in the past are no longer where they once stood. “We have already lost 200 trees and expect to lose more. Some of these were planted several decades ago and others are centuries old,” she says. Mukherjee, by selfadmission, has become “treeobsessed” ever since MMRCL (Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited) chainsaws knocked down three trees in her lane. “It’s a scary situation for tree lovers in the city right now. It’s devastating,” she says. She hopes that the hastag and the archive will encourage people to “stop and look” and also collaborate and contribute photos. Although her project has largely been limited to South Mumbai, she aims to cover the rest of the city too.
From tracing the life story of a French baker from Maharashtra to taking a peek into the lives of women domestic workers, Nupur Nanal uses her camera to tell stories that evoke emotion. “I don’t tell sad stories. I tell stories of resilience,” she says. The Pune-based photographer spends six months shooting weddings and the rest of the year travelling and documenting stories of people and communities. In 2015, she travelled across Europe to meet Maharashtrians who migrated from the state and settled into varied professions and lives. The pictures were exhibited at a show at the British Council, Delhi, and Nanal followed that up with a project, The Domestic Help, for the Goethe Institute on portraits of women domestic workers. She gave them a point-and-shoot camera and asked them to document their daily lives. The outcome was a story of 10 women who have spent their lives looking after their employers’ homes, leaving behind their own families. “They build an emotional bond with the employer’s family but their own emotions, aspirations and families are always hidden. I shot dignified portraits that bring out their inner beauty,” she says. It’s an ongoing series and Nanal now plans to take her project to other cities to document more women in the same occupation.
I“The camera is my medium to tell stories of resilience” “I want to create a space where people talk to share stories, and not just for the likes”
f a single person listens to my story, my life will be worth it,” says a woman in a village in Bihar who has been called Janardhan bahu all her life. It was a turning point for Vatsala Shrivastava, Founder, Bindi Bottoms—representative of women from top to bottom—who had set out to gather stories of transition in the lives of Indian women. “I wanted to tell stories of many Janardhan bahus,” she says. Once a journalist, Shrivastava spent four years in the US where she met other women like her, in transition, between two different worlds. On her return in 2015, she noticed that India was on the cusp of change in a subtle manner through everyday choices made by women. So came the idea of Bindi Bottoms that chronicles their stories from around the country. “They are stories of freedom, of choice and of a particular moment when the person is a winner,” she says. Though the stories have been collected in audio, video and text formats, they are available on the website as text only. After every 100-150 stories, she issues a report with her observations. She has globalised the platform by inviting women to contribute their stories, localised it through geotagging and democratised it by letting people upload them.