The Female Body in Visual Narratives

When a photographer seeks to capture the culture of a particular place inhabited by a minority group in society, a pertinent question arises as to how one might capture the female body in ways that avoid eroticisation while still conveying the photographer’s intent. The way photographers approach the Himalayan and Indian regions is particularly complex when they must decide whether to ask women to pose themselves in order to frame the multiple narratives that emerge out of a female body—such as motherhood, nurturing an infant, ornamentation and adornment, and the bodily manifestations of patriarchal and prejudicial practices. Photographer Olivier Föllmi, for instance, addresses the challenge of framing the maternal body by involving his wife in the photographic process to create a sense of emotional comfort, and by positioning the photographed woman to gaze directly at the spectator. His work, however, foregrounds the dynamics of othering and the white gaze. This paper argues that even when the female body is not overtly eroticized, it may still be subjected to the ideology of the photographer through the very act of visual capture in specific ways. Accordingly, the paper examines this tension through a close reading of Föllmi’s photographs.