The Work of Delay: Reading Liquid Borders. Dissident Bodies

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The Work of Delay: Reading Liquid Borders. Dissident Bodies

From the Series The Photo Book Written From Here : Amit Madheshiya

The blur comes first.

A boy enters the frame from the left; his body is still in motion. The camera catches him in passing. His face tilts down, his lips pressed tight. A trace of hesitation remains. At the center of the photograph, a woman leans against a street wall. She looks directly into the camera. Her pose feels deliberate. She stands with her legs crossed, one hand tucked into her pocket, the other fiddling her hair. To her right stands a man. He is also looking at the camera, though not quite posing.

The composition holds the three bodies in a neat triangle. However, the photograph holds them unequally. The woman claims the photographic moment. The man seems to have arrived in it by chance. The boy is in a rush to leave it. The present disperses, thinning across the photograph.

This dispersion is the operating condition in Liquid Borders. Dissident Bodies by Anita Khemka.

That photograph does not read as a portrait in the usual sense. The woman’s posture and her direct gaze give it the composure of a portrait. The man lingers, as if unsure whether to stay. The boy already seems to be leaving. Taken together they unsettle the portrait. The street ceases to be a backdrop and presses into the frame.

Khemka uses this interruption as a method throughout the book. She places her protagonists in streets where their presence is crossed by other people and their lines of sight. She draws upon the uncertainty of the street, allowing it to abrade the near certainty of a portrait. Portraiture and street photography meet here, but neither stabilizes.

This instability is intensified by the glances in the street. Some are directed at the protagonist. Others meet the camera directly, and some avoid it altogether. The photograph becomes a crowded negotiation of glances. The viewer arrives late to the field and is required to navigate the instability rather than absorb it into a unified scene.

In another photograph, the scene is further complicated by the addition of an image within it. A woman is sitting on a pavement; her red dress pooled against the grimy road. Around her, movement on the street continues. Two men are already at the edge of the frame, their bodies angled forward while their heads are turned back towards her. From the opposite side, two boys and a girl are entering the frame. One looks towards the woman. The others’ attention is directed towards a large photograph mounted on stands – the photograph is from another street; markedly different from where this scene unfolds. The woman, sitting in front of the photograph, looks into the camera. A street dog, seated beside her, is the only one to direct its attention outside of the frame.

The photograph has no single scale of attention and no unified present either. Looking is divided between the body and the image, between what unfolds here and what has happened elsewhere. The two do not resolve easily.

Throughout the book, the women appear on roads and pavements. Bags pressed close to the body. Phones in hand. Shoes laced. They register first as figures in transit, suspended between departure and arrival. Even the title suggests movement across borders, making transit the frame through which they are first seen.

The introduction changes that initial reading. Shohini Ghosh writes that the women had gathered in Kathmandu for a regional summit of sex workers – to assert sex work as work and to claim its place within the language of rights. In the book, sex work enters as context, not as identity. This knowledge does not settle the photographs. It shifts what is at stake in the act of looking.

In an accompanying interview with Sabeena Gadihoke, Khemka explains that the use of photographs within photographs grew out of geopolitical constraint, not simply aesthetic choice. Unable to travel freely across the subcontinent, she brings the streets of the women’s own cities into the frame. Political constraints shape the work. Bodies arrive in the present of the camera while places arrive as images. Here, borders are not metaphors. They are limits.

Alongside this physical constraint, there is also a deliberate refusal. In withholding the women’s workplace, Khemka unsettles a familiar visual logic. The site of labor has long anchored interpretation, binding the body to its function. Showing sex work where it occurs risks collapsing the image into evidence.

This refusal responds to an earlier moment, when visibility itself carried a different promise. Mary Ellen Mark’s Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay (1981) belongs to this lineage. Emerging from a documentary tradition that treated exposure as ethical, the work relied on proximity to anchor meaning. By bringing the subject closer, the work aimed to elicit an ethical response and reduce the distance between viewer and photographed body.

On the cover of Falkland Road is a portrait of a petite sex worker. Her hair is combed, and she wears only a silver neckpiece. Her folded arms frame her naked breasts. Her expression carries anger. She looks directly into the camera; her nakedness fixed in an eternal present.

Inside the book, the women appear in their workspaces, often beside clients. The greens and blues of the narrow rooms flare under the burst of flash and gather on exposed skin. The photograph takes you in; there is no distance. Turning each page renews the contract: proximity promises knowledge, and visibility claims truth.

What has shifted since is both the politics of representation and the conditions under which images circulate. Photographer and subject alike now understand the power of images and the uncontrolled afterlives they acquire. Photographs no longer arrive alone. They circulate among countless others. The urgency once attached to witnessing now risks reducing the image to evidence, shared and consumed at speed.

Khemka’s work engages this altered field. Her photographs do not certify the truth of labor, nor do they promise the clarity often associated with documentary. Instead, they position the body in a way that keeps the encounter open. This refusal carries its own risks. Ambiguity alone does not expose structural conditions. It does not guarantee ethical looking either. An image can remain indeterminate and still leave the systems that shape those lives unexamined. Here, however, indeterminacy interrupts categorical fixation. The women do not settle into the roles of victim, symbol, or exemplar.

This delay in reading matters. When an image resolves immediately, it assigns position, fixing the body before it is understood. Khemka interrupts that reading. The image refuses easy alignment. The viewer must work through the encounter. The scattered details – bags, phones, shoes, glances, blur – demand durational attention. In staying with them, what comes into view is the labor of looking itself.

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