A Mumbai photographer has caused outrage after publishing images which appear to glamorise the attack of a female student on board a New Delhi bus. Claire Cohen asks whether fashion and art that depict crime can add anything positive to the conversation .
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Presumably it seemed like a good idea at the time. But photographer Raj Shetye’s new picture series has sent ripples of anger around the world.
Why? ‘The Wrong Turn’, as it’s called, depicts a young, glamorously dressed, Indian woman on a bus, posing being groped and manhandled by a gang of men. In one image she holds her head, while two men attempt to pull her arms apart. In another she’s straddled by a man seemingly naked, but for a pair of boots. A particularly controversial shot shows the model being held in a grip lock by one man, while another pulls her bare leg from her long dress and appears to be kissing her knee.
Needless to say, it’s not a huge leap to associate the posed images with the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a bus in New Delhi, in December 2012. The crime shocked India, started an unprecedented debate on the vulnerability of women to sexual assault and led to days of protests, which forced authorities to introduce tough new anti-rape laws. Four of the perpetrators were eventually sentenced to death.
The Mumbai based photographer has denied that his work depicts the exact circumstances of the crime, which Indians refer to by the pseudonym given to the victim; ‘Nirbhaya, a Hindi word meaning ‘fearless’.
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