A Vividly Real Account Of Calcutta’s Brothels

“It’s almost impossible to photograph in the red light district. Everyone is terrified of the camera, they are frightened of being found out. Everything is illegal. It’s a whole separate society within itself. I mean, you just walk down that one lane and it’s another world.”

- Zana Briski, Born Into Brothels

Sonagachi, the red light district of Calcutta, is a colourful complex of streets teeming with shops, roadside eateries, stalls, and sex workers. Brothel houses line the alleys as women adorned in saris and make up welcome patrons passing by. While authors, journalists and photographers have, on multiple occasion, attempted to capture the essence of sex worker communities across the world, the inside perspective is a difficult one to get. We admire the beautiful work of Mary Ellen Mark as she captured the sex workers of Falkland Road in the 70s, and we are just as captivated by Zana Briski’s attempt to do the same in Calcutta in the new millennium. As this English photographer ventures into the intricate lanes of Sonagachi, she uncovers personal aspects of the residents’ lives--their hardships, brotherhood, desperation, joy, family bonds, and the undeniable knowledge of reality in their eyes, eclipsed by their flickering hope to change. And she does all this with a little help from eight young children.

“The men who enter our building are not so good. They are drunk. They come inside and shout and swear. The women ask me, “When are you going to join the line?” They say it won’t be long.”

- Daughter of a sex worker in Sonagachi, Born Into Brothels.

As Zana Briski journeyed to India in 1995, she began to travel and uncover the harsh realities of women’s lives in the subcontinent, such as female infanticide, child marriage, widowhood and dowry deaths. In 1998, she wandered into Calcutta’s brothels, and as she witnessed the complex world she had walked into, she knew she had to stay. “I had no intention of photographing prostitutes until a friend took me to the red light district in Calcutta. From the moment I stepped foot inside that maze of alleyways, I knew that this was the reason I had come to India,” she shared with npr.org.

The community of sex workers in Sonagachi was a close and intimate one, which didn’t welcome outsiders very easily. For months Briski tried to gain access to the impenetrable society, yearning to live with the women, learn about their lives and understand their realities. After being rejected and ignored for months, her persistence was not in vain, and eventually a brothel owner gave her a room. It was this room through which she experienced Sonagachi and the lives of the women caught helplessly in their own circumstance. It took her a long time to gain their trust, but when she did, they intimate moments she shared with them are unimaginable. “I sat for hours on end, joking, playing, experiencing the tediousness and volatile emotions that erupt where women find themselves trapped in an inescapable world, forced to sell affection in order to live and care for their children,” she elaborated in an interview.

“And of course, as soon as I entered the brothels, I met the children.”

- Zana Briski, Born Into Brothels

While the women of this community were wary of outsiders like Briski, naivety and innocence of their children allowed them to interact with her more freely. Briski photographs of Sonagachi, as well as her documentary Born Into Brothels, portray the sex workers’ children as extremely curious and infectiously lively. Despite the girls being reminded of their imminent fate as they got older, and the boys being taught that this district and life in it was all they would ever be, their innocence led them to being happy and cheerful in the face of the reality around them. The years she spent living in Calcutta’s red light district were enriched through her interactions with these children, and she soon realized that their view of Sonagachi was a particularly unique perspective.
To explore this unique view, Briski bought point-and-shoot cameras and gathered the most interested children to teach them how to click photographs. As she trained and mentored them, she discovered the intricacies of this complex world through their lenses. Eight young children became her students of photography, and took time away from their schoolwork and household chores to capture everything they saw. They photographed the streets, each other, their families, their homes, and every other aspect of their lives with an unbiased focus. Their sessions with Briski involved understanding the nuances of photography as they critiqued their own, as well as each other’s photographs. Furthering this, Briski started a non-profit, Kids with Cameras, in 2002 that teaches the art of photography to marginalized children in various communities across the world, and aims at empowering them with cameras to tell their stories.

Briski’s gritty account of Sonagachi through her photographs, her book, as well as her documentary was an involved one, as she personally attempted to help the children of this community. From getting them legal documentation to helping them get enrolled in good schools, she took tangible steps in the right direction. When she discovered that HIV and other STDs were rampant in the brothel, she helped the children get tested for HIV and got them any additional medical attention that they might have required. As she integrated into their society and lived their lives alongside them for years, her vividly real portrayal of this community is both thought-provoking and touching.

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