- Other Dated Added: Submitted by: Helping The Hobbyist Community
Photographs of Prostitutes--Falkland Road
Old Images of Prostitutes in India are Newly Wrenching
Photo, Mary Ellen Mark--From the book "Falkland Road," a photograph of a prostitute, Kamia, with a customer behind curtains, in Bombay, India, 1978.
"Picturesque" is what the West has called India for centuries. But when the American photographer Mary Ellen Mark started visiting in the 1960's, she didn't head for the Taj Mahal. She hung out on a jammed and noisy street in Bombay called Falkland Road, the city's busiest low-rent, red-light district.
Mary Ellen Mark--A photograph of Putla and Rekha, on Falkland Road, in Bombay.
Her goal was to photograph the prostitutes - men and women, children and adults - who lived and worked there. Along with their handlers and clients, they were figures absent from most travel guides and histories. In a book of photographs titled "Falkland Road," published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981, Ms. Mark put them, indelibly, on the record.
Long out of print, the book has been reissued in an expanded edition by Steidl. And the complete photographic series, exhibited only once before in the United States, is on view in two Chelsea galleries, Marianne Boesky and Yancey Richardson. Last seen nearly a quarter of a century ago, the images are as startling and engrossing as ever. And with the devastating spread of AIDS in India since they were made, they are something more.
Ms. Mark had a tough time starting the project. The Falkland Road prostitutes greeted this American with a camera and unknown intentions with voluble distrust, pelting her with garbage and insults. But she kept coming back, and persistence was persuasive. Eventually, one of the madams befriended her, and everything followed from that.
For three months beginning in October 1978, Ms. Mark spent much of her time on Falkland Road. She photographed prostitutes at work: bathing, putting on makeup, displaying themselves in doorways or in cagelike street windows, or having sex with clients in upstairs brothels.
She also documented their private lives. Madams were hardnosed managers but also surrogate mothers to the teenagers who worked for them, and who, in certain cases, already had children of their own. Prostitutes often forged bonds of mutually protective affection among themselves. Some had steady boyfriends.
Transvestite prostitutes - many of them eunuchs, or hijras - seem particularly at ease in front of Ms. Mark's camera, with or without their male lovers. They look as if they're having fun, flirting and vamping. (For another, very different photographic take on Indian eunuchs, I highly recommend Dayanita Singh's book, "Myself Mona Ahmed," published by Scalo in 2001.)
In short, the forms of intimacy were manifold, and Ms. Mark caught many of them. She also caught ruin in progress, in images of young people made old in ways that no amount of makeup can hide. "Falkland Road" is about a life of necessity, not luxury, though it is a life with its own codes of honor, pride, status and glamour, and one with its own dangers.
When Ms. Mark was working, AIDS had not yet surfaced. Anyone coming to these photographs for the first time will surely be struck by their almost overwhelming vitality. Anyone who also saw them in 1981 will feel a remembered wonder and a sense of foreboding that is new.
(Review # 13520)
- New Delhi From another point of view Dated Added: Tue Nov 23 1999 Submitted by: John
I will be surprised if this makes it on to this page but here goes.
Most girls in Delhi's brothels are young girls that are kidnapped from villages in N.India and Nepal. These girls as young as 12 disappear in there thousands every year. Especially Nepalese girls who are famed for their sexual prowess. Once these girls get to the brothels they are held against their will and threatened with beatings and even death if they don't work. The only escape is when as always they get HIV and they are turned onto the streets. Most girls actually are expected to contact the virus within a year so the prospects and risk is terrible. They cannot return to their villages as due to the culture they are shamed by their families ,that's if they actually know where they come from.
I am not one of your do gooders and have previously used brothels myself, but after visiting a shelter in Kathmandu where beautiful young girls are dying of aids I know I could now never do something to encourage this slavery. Do not kid yourself that these girls enjoy what they do and that a westerners wage will help as they very rarely actually get to keep any money that they are given as all food is provided by the brothel. If you want to do any thing for these poor girls help them escape or at the very least don't encourage the trafficking of girls by visiting them. Remember you are encouraging other peoples misery. (Review # 846)
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