Photographing Sex Workers: Bhavya Sah

Sex workers have been frequent subjects for visual representation in art, photography, and films. They are considered outsiders, living on the margins of society, often physically so with many red-light areas located in urban outskirts. Their lives are subject to multiple levels of interrogation and capturing the sex worker on camera becomes a way to gain access to places and practices considered to be taboo. The objective of such photography ranges from revealing the brutality and violence inflicted on the body of sex workers, to biographical attempts of telling their stories, to even a portrayal of their fetishized objectification.

In this essay, I wish to engage with the ethical questions which come into play when sex workers become photographic subjects. This concerns the larger politics of showing and seeing.^[1] On the part of the photographer, the preoccupation may range from formal elements being shown in the photographs to consciously made aesthetic and ethical choices. These positions may or may not anticipate the viewer’s position and perception. The photograph is subjected to various aspects of gaze: be it the photographers, the viewers, and the gaze of the subject itself.^[2] Hence, three worlds intersect when a photograph is taken, that of the subject (in this case, the sex workers), the photographer, and the viewer, the latter two being outsiders who visually enter the world of the former. One cannot avoid the irony here, when the socially marginalized sex worker becomes the insider to her own world, pried open by the visiting viewer / photographer, the outsider and insider briefly switching places.

Over time, there has developed a register for such pictures. As stated by photographer Cristina de Middel on her website, “If aliens came to Earth and tried to understand what prostitution is about, they would believe it is a business based on naked women staying in dirty rooms.”^[3] Almost all depictions across media tend to follow these unofficial, visually reductive registers. Middel inverses this through her work, “The Gentleman’s Club” (2015-2019). This is done by photographing the customer instead of the sex worker. The onus, the subject of the work and the stigma has always been on the worker. The photographer too at most times has chosen to explore the other: the actual outsider who visits the sex workers and the red-light area is ignored. Middel’s work proves to be fascinating with such an inversion. Here, the customer is shown as an active participant. Many photographs obscure the faces of customers in order to protect their identities, whereas the sex worker is bared open for all to see, often in a state of undress. Where the sex worker is pushed to the margins of society, the existence of this customer is often overlooked. Middel changes the narrative, showcasing sex workers, but through other individuals involved with them.

There is always going to be distance between a photographer and the subject,^[4] even if it is just by the virtue of the distance that the physical presence of the camera allows to be between them. The question of the photographer as an outsider is of importance when it comes to visualizing sex workers; this position is played out in social, regional, or economic ways.

In her essay, Insider / Outsider, Abbey Hepner refers to Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s pressing question of whether truth should be “placed on the inside” and whether the “insider would objectify the same subject any less.”^[5] An interesting exception to explore is when those considered to be insiders are given the camera, such as in the case of Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s “Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids” (2004),^[6] where the children of the sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata’s red light district were given cameras to take pictures. It would be interesting to see how their treatment of the subject would be different to that of an ‘outsider’ since dichotomies of the insider/ outsider are no longer active.

Unlike other photographers and filmmakers who visit or stay at the red-light areas to photograph them, the children are insiders and residents of the area. Their personal relationship to their surroundings and individuals gives them a different form of access and familiarity. They take photos of people who are their family members and neighbours, going about their daily routines. Objects like a car or a tree, which would often be ignored by the passerby photographer are often the focus of photographs by them.

The intentions behind photographing sex workers could range from raising awareness, to gaining insight, to evoking shock or horror. These photographs are sensitive to specific issues of ethics, violation, privacy, consent, and fetishism. The bodies of sex workers are also subject to exaggeration and performativity. A photograph by the Indo-British photographer Souvid Dutta, clicked in the red-light district of West Bengal, Sonagachi, and showing the rape of a minor sex worker has been central to such debates on the ethics of photography. Though Dutta recounts how the girl wanted her story to be told, hence consenting to the photograph, critics regard the violence of this image as proof of how we romanticize the sex worker’s life rather than portraying her as a witness to / victim of abuse.^[6] As stated by Charumathi Sankaran in her article, “a child being raped – photographed in a tinted frame, with the sharp use of colour and subtle filters, her blank eyes looking at the camera – draws shock, not empathy.”^[7]

A photograph and its maker can have the power to influence the way in which sex work is perceived. Does the responsibility lie with the photographer (the one showing) or the viewer (the one seeing)? As a community, sex workers are vulnerable to exploitation; viewed as outcastes they are pushed to the margins of society. Because of this, they often have no legal safeguards to protect them. The photographer has the power to make this exploitation visible and use them to demand better conditions and rights for those they choose to photograph. For the viewer, the dilemma is between being a voyeur or a viewer. How actively does the viewer engage with this image? Do they merely glance at the image, appreciating / critiquing the aesthetic choices made on the part of the photographer, or is there an attempt to place the image in a larger order of things, the social-economic relations and exploitation that led to its existence (the photographs) in the first place.

The photographer, his personal interaction with subjects and the resulting image consist only part of the ethical dilemmas surrounding photography. The rest of the moral burden is on the viewer and the way they see a photograph. Ariella Azoulay in her work, The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), calls attention to “the need to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it.” According to her, if the subject of a photograph is an individual who has been subjected to a form of injury, the photograph needs to be viewed in a way that would “reconstructs the photographic situation.” The reading of the injury inflicted upon others would then be a civic skill and not just aesthetic appreciation.^[8] This could translate into an understanding of external players or the social conditions and relations that led to the creation of the photograph by the viewer.

Indian photographer, Sudharak Olwe, describes on his website, the experience of taking pictures in the red-light area of Kamathipura in Mumbai, as one filled with feelings of horror and helplessness when he first walked into the lanes.^[9] “I have walked there for many years, asking myself, who are these women? They live in the heart of my world. What do I really know about them? How do they survive? Why are they forced to live like this? It took me months and years before I had the courage to take my camera out of my backpack. Not only because I was sure it would get smashed (and quite rightly so) but also because I had to first earn the right to see. These women are sellers of sex. But they are not the sum total of their private parts.”

This translates into his photographs as well, which depict everyday life in Kamathipura. One shows a group of women sitting in a small room, another one shows a woman clad in a bright pink sari and talking on her cell phone, gazing directly into the camera. There is no excess. The camera appears not to be violating their lives for the edification of the viewer but gently recording their everyday existence. At first glance one would assume these photographs to be that of any other small locality, with bustling roads. The women photographed by him appear similar to any other, living in squalor and poverty, the difference being that the former are forced out of the mainstream because of the nature of their work. The horrors of their everyday lives are conveyed through the depiction of the mundane. As stated by Olwe, it took him years to get himself to photograph his subjects, something which he only felt comfortable with after gaining their trust and consent.

Azoulay emphasizes on the space of the photograph as being an “alternative space.” The photograph provides ground for the other; those who have been abandoned by “institutional structures who continue to shirk responsibility toward these subjects and refuse to compensate them for damages.”^[10] This space becomes one for expression – a space where they are seen and heard by the mainstream and by those within the borders of society.

Present day innovations and changing boundaries due to developments in technology pose new problems concerning consent, representation, Photoshop and plagiarism for the already complex issue of ethics and responsibility. “No Man’s Land” (2011-2013) by photographer and artist Mishka Henner is an example of the predicaments that are going to be faced by photographers and spectators in the present. Henner made use of Google street view to click images of sex workers (women appearing to solicit sex).^[11] The images are captured in a new way involving Google street coordinates sourced from online forums in what is called Doxyspotting, where men share local knowledge on the whereabouts of sex workers. For Henner’s work, questions of consent are raised since photographs are taken discreetly from Google Street View as the subject remains unaware.

In her paper, “Monitoring the Margins: Street Views of Sex Workers,” author Louise Wolthers explains how the forum where the images are taken from is “virtual curb-crawling, mirroring the discriminatory effects of everyday monitoring practices.” She further emphasizes on the dangers it could pose for those photographed, citing cases where users have travelled to the places captured by Google Street View and picked up sex workers. The play of inequality and the question of violation of privacy can be better understood when she mentions the same users as “criticizing Google’s breach into his own privacy.”^[12] Henner’s work gives us a fascinating insight into the increasing complexities of photography and ethics, consent and access when it comes to photographing sex workers.

The politics of photographing those on the margins plays on the existing inequalities between the photographer, the subject and the viewer. There is always going to be a performance of power between the photographer and the photographed.^[13] This is magnified when those being photographed have been ignored from mainstream narratives.

As stated by Y.S. Alone, “an idea of the normative can be multidimensional.” The photographer and the viewer may have separate parameters for it. According to him, this could be a “stumbling block” when there is an attempt to enter and dislodge accepted canons as well as social concerns.^[14] Christina de Middel manages to expand the narrative through her photographs by focusing on the customer, a point of view sex work is rarely seen from. Sudharak Olwe photographs sex workers by detailing their everyday lives. No more is the depiction of the sex worker restricted to merely dirty rooms and exposed body parts. Olwe photographs them outside this narrative and sometime the space of their rooms, as members of a larger community. The photographer and their camera play a pivotal role in what can be an attempt to make the invisible, visible.^[13] The camera proves to be a powerful tool to visualize the margins. The photographers with access to these areas can help in revealing its own truth without being seen as sensationalizing it. This also means a reassessment of the responsibilities for us as photographers and spectators^[7] and the shifting dichotomies of the insider / outsider,^[4] between merely seeing to actively participating and the inclusion of those into narratives that have ignored them in the past, or else, of the creation of alternate narratives for their stories to be told.

References

1. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008.

2. Henner, Mishka. “No Man’s Land.” Mishkahenner.com. 20.Apr.2020.

3. Hepner, Abbey. “Insider / Outsider: Photographing the Other.” 19.Oct.2017.

4. Olwe, Sudharak. “11th Lane: Kamathipura.” 20.Apr.2020.

5. Sankaran, Charumathi. “Dailyo.” 12.May.2017. www.dailyo.in. 20.Apr.2020.

6. Wolthers, Louise. “Monitoring the Margins: Street Views of Sex Workers.” Photography and Culture, Volume 9. No 3, 2016: 239-254.

7. Frosh, Paul. “The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power.” Social Semiotics. No.11, 2001: 43-59.

8. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002). “Showing seeing: a Critique of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture, 1(2), 165–181.

9. Lutz, Catherine Lutz and Collins. “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic.” Visual Anthropology Review, 1991.7:134-149

10. Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, 1977.

11. Briski, Zana and Kauffman, Ross. Born into Brothels, 2004.

12. Professor Y. S Alone, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi 2020.

__________

^[1] W.J.T  Mitchell (2002). “Showing seeing: a Critique of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture, 1(2), 165–181.

^[2] Catherine Lutz, Jane Collins. The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic. Visual Anthropology Review, 1991.7:134-149.

^[3] Christina De Middel. “The Gentlemans Club” (2015).

^[4] Susan Sontag.“In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, 1977.

^[5] Abbey Hepner quoting Abigail Solomon Godeau’s Inside / Out. Insider / Outsider: Photographing the Other. Published October 19th, 2017.

^[6] Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman. Born Into Brothels, 2004.

^[7] Charumathi Sankaran, Dailyo. 12 May 2017.

^[8] Ariella Azoulay. The Civil Contract of Photography . New York: Zone Books, 2008.

^[9] Sudharak Olwe. “11th Lane: Kamathipura.” www.sudharakolwe.com. 20 April 2020.

^[10]Ariella Azoulay. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008:19.

^[11] Mishka Henner. “No Man’s Land.” Mishkahenner.com. 20 April 2020.

^[12] Louise Wolthers. “Monitoring the Margins: Street Views of Sex Workers.” Photography and Culture, Volume 9. No 3, 2016: 239-254.

^[13]  Paul Frosh.“The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power.” Social Semiotics. No.11, 2001: 43-59.

^[14] Professor Y. S Alone, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi 2020.

Photograph © Christina Middle

Silvio, 28 years. Security guard at a nightclub. Single. He visits a prostitute 3 times a week and he pays 3500 Rs (40 Euros) for 40 minutes with two girls. He started making use of these services when he was 14, out of curiosity and he likes to spend time with women when he’s drunk.

Photograph © Christina Middle

Charles doesn’t want to say his age. He’s a worker in the metal industry. He never got married and he has 3 children. He visits a prostitute 3 times a week and pays 1000 to 2500 Rs (12-25 Euros) per session. He started visiting prostitutes when he was 17 years old when his father took him to a strip club. He keeps visiting prostitutes because it’s something different and to gain experience by visiting these women.

Photograph © Christina Middle

Daniel, 34 years old. Works as a security guard. He’s married and he has 8 children. He visits prostitutes 3 times a week and usually doesn’t pay for the services, because he works in the same club as the prostitutes. He started going to prostitutes when he was 19 years old and he keeps doing it because he likes the pleasure without commitment.

Photograph © Christina Middle

Newton, 43 years. DJ. Single and father of 3 children. He visits a prostitute 2 or 3 times a week and he pays 1500 Rs (16 Euros) per session. He started visiting prostitutes when he was 22 and he keeps doing it because he’s not hurting anyone, it’s fun, there are no emotions involved and because it’s simply a commercial transaction.

Photograph © Sudharak Olwe

Photograph © Sudharak Olwe

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