On one of the extended trips I took to India I worked with a man called Jack Prager in Calcutta, and visited a women’s sterilisation clinic in Bangalore.
In all the time I have spent in India, and I guess that to be close on 3 years, this was the most intimate, and because of the intimacy, painful time. I saw a profoundly female world; their lives, what they endured, how they lived and loved. I had never before or since been privy to such an intensely female world in a 3rd world where women have no value.
I witnessed suffering on a scale that was profoundly human, photographed female lepers with no fingers, no toes yet amazing dignity and beauty. Sat in rooms filled with women who cared for each other as they waited for, or recovered from, sterilisation operations that could only be performed just after their 4th child. They are, or were, illegal before 4 live births. In the clinic for sick children women and their babies were dying in front of us. Children so frail, women so completely resigned to waiting for the system to notice them and deal with the problem, the stillness was eerie.
After these two series I could not go back to India for 10 years. I had seen enough. But the images are very beautiful, even in so much suffering, they are strong, powerful women caught by the needs of their culture. I guess most of us are….
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