Exploring Archetypes Of Femininity & Beauty Via Intimate Portraits

Natasha Hemrajani’s Forbidden Fruit is part of an on-going series that explores concepts of the feminine archetype and examines the constructs of beauty. Women are perceived as objects of lust and temptation, as those who incite the baser instincts of men. This is reinforced by the item girls and heroines of Bollywood whom an enslaved male public is taught to fantasise over in private, while at the same time, at home, mothers, sisters and wives must be the embodiment of purity and virtue. The actual sexual self of the Indian woman is fraught with this duality. The desire to be wanted is mixed with guilt and shame because longing to be sexually attractive or beautiful means losing a level of respect that only the appearance of pseudo-virginity carries.

The Indian feminine archetype is largely obsessed with virginal beauty, fertility, youth, purity, temptation, desire, and chastity. The paradox of the Indian woman lies in the duality of her sexual existence: women are always torn between being typecast as either the Madonna or the whore—and Hemrajani has used symbolic objects and semi-caricatured poses to play with these archetypes.

Forbidden Fruit instantly references Eve and the enigma of the apple: did humanity fall because we sought knowledge or because we succumbed to desire? And the instrumentality of a woman facilitating this game-changing event in the history of man is even more relevant today. Forbidden Fruit is a dialogue between the construction of beauty and the nature of desire in the playground of the feminine archetype.

Hemrajani’s decision to use her elderly Muslim aunt allowed her to create different kinds of darkly humorous scenarios where she could examine the obsession with portraying women as youthful and sexy, instead of aged and respectable. Her aunt always wanted to be a model. “To her, it makes no difference that she’s not young or does not posses the ‘acceptable’ industry standard of beauty to be a model. She is in fact as seduced by the glamour of the industry as anybody else and doesn’t see why she can’t, for instance, act in a sexy ad or pose for a magazine,” explains Hemrajani.

The paradox of portraying an older woman in a veil, surrounded by symbolic objects often associated with a more nubile, young and wanton woman, questions the constrictive nature of beauty. Beyond the veil of female virtue lies an elderly woman’s desire to be thought of as beautiful, in a world where only the young are beautiful.

Scroll down to see images from Forbidden Fruit