Misogyny and racism as spectacle and performance: A critique of Mahesh Shantaram’s ‘The African Portraits’ and ‘Forbidden Love’
When a project is constructed around nudity and equated with freedom, does a woman who chooses not to disrobe for any reason then live in permanent unfreedom? How does one photograph women naked and interpret that as “power” when women in India, especially Dalit and Adivasi, are regularly stripped as punishment? You can read part one of this essay here.
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I first saw photographer Mahesh Shantaram’s work titled “The African Portraits” in August 2018 when I received the following message from him over Facebook Messenger. “Hi Suchitra… You may (or may not) be aware of my 2016-17 project ‘The African Portraits’ which attempts to get under the skin of racism and xenophobia in India. I thought I got done with it last year but then when I was invited to write for a journal about the project, it gave it a new lease of life. Now I’m going to finish up the research (with 1-2 trips to Africa in the winter) and publish the whole story as a book in March 2019. Please do check out the campaign and let me know if you have any questions, thoughts. Could it be featured on POLIS? http://bit.ly/TheAfricanPortraits.” I was immediately struck by the aesthetic—the lighting, the rendering in these images of Africans…
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