In the summer of 2022, I sat in a hotel room in suburban Delhi. The soaring temperatures, rush-hour traffic and the general lethargy of tropical summers had discouraged me from stepping outside. Instead, I had spent the day inside rewatching French film noir — their beautiful, dark heroines were swimming in my imagination. Perhaps it was the beauty of Joan Crawford in such harsh lighting that defined that era of film making. And perhaps it was my secret desire to be the subject of such frames that I decided to take a few pictures. Knowing I would neither have the money nor courage to hire a professional photographer, I put my own phone camera to work, an average iPhone with tolerable-quality cameras. I turned the camera setting to a basic monochrome filter and snapped a few pictures of myself in a hotel room mirror. Nude. Only my long, curly hair fell over my shoulders in an unstyled mess.
Photography as an art form has always fascinated me. The practice was a major inspiration for my academic engagement with cultural studies. It was also a political weapon for my student activism during my undergraduate years in a quickly polarizing, fascist India; I photographed evidence of attacks on minorities and civil rights, and shared it on social media, public platforms and even in a few exhibitions. Photography was also the only way to carry with me people and places I loved while continuously moving from city to city, navigating continents and oceans after I graduated and left my hometown. Yet, the act of using photography to immortalize the intimate nudity of my flabby stomach, misshapen breasts or rolls of fat that are completely out of place by modern beauty standards had been absolutely unthinkable. I always imagined that boudoir photographs, characterized by their featuring of intimate spaces and sensual, romantic poses with nearly the entire body on display, were limited to professional models. I assumed that pose training, the possession of an already perfect body further sculpted by a battery of professionals and stylists, and the ability to flaunt a careless comfort in front of the lens were prerequisites for the genre.
However, the boredom and the social media explosion generated by the pandemic lockdowns created a sudden boom in the boudoir genre in early 2020. These new boudoir photographs, mostly monochrome, were of mundane people — bankers, lawyers and housewives — and they looked smashingly beautiful. Sure, they had stretch marks, belly rolls and uneven breasts like me. These were not bodies that were sculpted by professionals or used to having the lens pointed at them, but this was hardly noticeable, (or perhaps it was noticeable in a beautiful way), as the pictures emphasized the ethereal aura of the human body in its natural form.
As I lounged about the hotel room after finishing the french films, I browsed through a few of these photographs under the Instagram hashtag #boudoirphotography. Perhaps this beauty could be true about my body, too, I thought to myself. I had looked too long and too critically at my body for nearly two decades. All I could see was its flaws. Given my struggle with body image issues throughout much of my adult life, boudoir photography both intrigued and terrified me. What I grappled with was not a crippling dysmorphia, but I had come to accept myself as less than beautiful.
Nonetheless, I decided to try my hand at photography. Captured in the unlikely studio space of a cheap hotel room, my iPhone camera photographs transformed the lukewarm relationship I had with my body. In those days, I was an adult amateur equestrian training to learn show jumping. My knees were bruised from regular accidents, my thighs were shaped by the strain of controlling a 600-pound animal, my spine sat straight, used to carrying my weight for hours of training every week. The body in the photograph was a thing of strength, resilience and grit. It was not a dainty body like the models in most nude photographs. It was neither as “perfect” nor as fragile, but I liked what I saw.
My strength and muscularity were a sign of my privileged life as a woman — I had the opportunity to develop such strength with fuel and exercise — and not many women born in the patriarchal societies of South Asia can say the same. The number of adult women in sports are woefully few — most drop their active lifestyle after puberty. Equestrianism is an expensive and niche sport, but over the years, I had seen friends give up on the more easily accessible ones like basketball or football, too. Eventually, they threw in their own towel and retired to tolerating their partners’ bizarre nationalist frenzy for cricket with a bemused smile.
Blessed with a supportive family, easy access to niche and interesting sports and a headstrong personality that would rarely bow to patriarchal norms of my society, I had continued to explore the limits of physical activeness well into adulthood. I had the opportunity to row at the University of Cambridge, to play contact sports, to live outdoors, to swim often and ride horses. My activity was evident through my unaesthetic tan lines, the one from my helmet strap so stark under my chin that the monochromes made it appear as a shadow beard.
A concerned aunt often moaned about how my beautiful, wheatish complexion and glossy, curly hair were ruined by what she called in colloquial Bengali, my “gechho” (loosely translatable to arboreal or monkey-like) predisposition. I would never find a husband, she warned. While my aunt might have been perpetuating the racist and sexist standards of beauty, it was true that fair skin or beautiful hair were currency in the “marriage market” in South Asia. I didn’t care. To have sun-burnt, coppery skin, tan lines and messy hair was a privilege of being able to flout the norms, and my hotel photographs were testimony to my fulfilling life.
But the photographs revealed more than just my pride-worthy physical activity. The romantic roundedness of my shoulders and calves, the curves on my waist, the dimples of Venus above my hips were all things I had forgotten to cherish in a hurry to hide the few rolls of fat that threatened to appear every now and then. I had often looked on with bitter disapproval at the mirrors in various harshly lit trial rooms in shopping malls, as a certain body part appeared “too fat” or “crooked” in a certain dress. But, in a photograph, I could appreciate my body and all of its “imperfections” at leisure. I felt sexy, as the photographs reminded me of some other photographs I had seen of the women in ancient temple sculptures from South and Southeast Asia or the paintings of women in the Egyptian bathhouses in orientalist art from post-Napoleonic France —maybe even a few of Manet’s impressionist works capturing plump girls.
I was a modern girl, choking in the torrid, polluted Delhi air, but my body belonged to a long lineage of foremothers and their enthralling femininity. It is widely acknowledged that the present standards of beauty, initiated from the super skinny models of fashion runways, were originally introduced because curvy women were deemed “too sexy” and drew attention away from the clothes. These modern, unrealistic standards have seen some backlash recently, causing, for example, Victoria’s Secret to rebrand with inclusive, body positive messaging. But, these changes were few and far apart, they had little impact on my sense of self-worth. My photographs, however, were different. I felt these pictures could be placed alongside photographs from ancient temples and early modern paintings of desirable but natural bodies, and that alone was enough to make me feel sensuous.
Our sexuality, I came to realize, is often constructed in our minds as we project how we think we are perceived. In reality, no one notices the flaws that we obsess over; maybe, people even find them sexy. More often, the difficult task is finding yourself sexy, and the camera, as an external eye, helps with that. The lens is impersonal and personal at the same time; it invades the most intimate and exposes the most vulnerable. While I never had the courage to develop the pictures into print, as I do with most things I photograph, I treasure them for the quiver and tremble they make me feel every time I take a quick peak. Seeing myself through a lens is not only healing, but also titillating. That, I reckon, is the most beautiful experience of our sexuality — the tiny fire that races up your spine and bursts forth in a blush on your cheek as you lower your eyes and bask in its warmth.
Statement Correspondent Srimati Ghosal can be reached at sghosal@umich.edu.