Indian Fashion Shoot Depicts Rape: WTF?
The photographer claims he's 'raising awareness' but the outcry suggests his point hasn't been well made
A little over a year ago a horrific rape and murder took place on a bus in Delhi, and now a series of photos has been released showing an Indian woman on a bus fending off aggressive-looking men - dressed in high couture and in full make up.
Though the photographer, Raj Shetye, claims the concept was dreamed up two years ago and only recently realised, the similarities between the scene depicted and the terrible reality are hard to ignore.
Shetye told BuzzFeed: "The aim is to create art that will gather some reaction in society.
“The message I would like to give is that it doesn’t matter who the girl is.
“It doesn’t depend on which class she belonged in — it can happen to anyone.”
These pictures come just a few months after Italian Vogue decided to run a fashion shoot based around domestic violence, with fashion models dressing up in top designer clothing while recreating scenes of extreme violence from the movies.
Plus on a slightly different angle, we had the Vice photoshoot recreating the suicides of famous women in tasteless detail.
Just what is it that artists find so beautiful about women subjected to violence?
Sheyte has said that this shoot wasn't for commercial gain and for that reason no brand names or fashion labels have been credited.
But the huge swathes of criticism he's received, and the fact that he's been asked to explain himself, suggest that his 'message' doesn't seem to have made it across.
Instead people inside India and around the world are disgusted by the obvious parallels to the Nirbhaya case (the name given as a pseudonym to the victim in the Delhi rape).
But Sheyte is just pleased to have got people talking.
He said: “On a personal level, too, I got many reactions. On my Facebook, from my friends. It makes me feel satisfied about my work — at least the work I did is so impactful that I’m able to shed some light on this.
"I don’t feel happy, but it makes me feel satisfied. That whatever I’ve tried to communicate is being communicated.”
When Vogue Italia received criticism for its violent photoshoot, editor Franca Sozzani said that her message was that "the horror of life is bigger than the one that you can see in the movies. This is really a horror show, what we are looking at and what we see every day in every newspaper around the world is how fragile the woman still is today, and how she can be attacked, can be abused, can be killed."
But we're not convinced that showing bloodied-up or struggling women under attack is the right way to go about preventing these sorts of things ocurring in real life.
Vice removed its suicide images and apologised, and Sheyte has also removed the offending shots from his website (without apology).
But with everyone from women on the streets to Angelina Jolie and William Hague fighting violence against women in the real world, when will artists and editors stop using women as their victim centrefolds?
Perhaps celebrating the women's strength would send a better message.
