A few people have a bed for the night. For a night the wind is kept from them. The snow meant for them falls on the roadway but it won't change the world. It won't improve relations among men. It will not shorten the age of exploitation.
– Bertolt Brecht, "A Bed for the Night".
I recently went to Vrindavan with two women, a high-art photographer from New Zealand and a Mexican art critic. Their purpose was to photograph the widows of Vrindavan and I their guide, interpreter, girlfriday. The salon photographer (whose employee I was) was interested in the iconic image and wanted to fit in the widows as part of a larger project on Madonna/motherhood. Her photographing technique consisted of taking not very good pictures, in flat light, with very little depth of field, somewhat bleached, and then to manipulate the images into something exotic and pretty. The idea, she said, is to maintain the 'grittiness' of the subject's situation – even as she would attempt to mitigate the exploitative conditions in which the photograph was to be taken – and finally, if I understood her correctly, to not fetishise the subject.
I did not understand how obscuring the details through digital manipulation and bleaching could do that. In any case, I admired her for her clarity and the well-thought-out programme to execute her plan. She was very clear about how she was going to photograph the widows: in an intimate space, in pure white, with the light shading off their faces. The mood and feeling of the moment would decide the posture they would take up. She had done her research and knew her ground intimately, with a target of 20 women. I was to enlist 25 as they scurried from the various bhajan ashrams to different households to finish their chores. The idea was to offer them 300 rupees each in exchange for their time and body – the money an over-valuation of their otherwise diminished worth in the eyes of society, to let them know that they do count. In general, the widows get about three rupees in the morning and three in the evening for singing kirtan in the city's ashrams and temples. So this was like a bonus.