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Writer's pictureSrestha Chatterjee
Feb 49 min read

How to make yourself an Insider through Photography


A small background


Wondering about wandering around the city was one of the key highlights of my teenage years. It felt as a sort of escape which lingered too long between the lines of my school lessons. I used to think that an independent world for a woman would be a little different than what my female relatives or neighbors used to warn me against. Yet, unfortunately some of their tales occasionally came to life once I started navigating the city on my own. Being on your own around the streets at any point of time in the day or night makes you feel that somehow you are watched. Watching or gazing or even lurking for too long at a distance, at a building or street calls for unwanted flickers of interest – either towards your bodily shape, your face, or your imaginary (mostly misread) intentions. Yes, it is true that a person could color you or your motives in thousand shades of mixed emotions – such are the terrors or paranoias of a cityscape. However, the emotion of physically entangling yourself into rush of city life, without having the rush to be somewhere or reach someplace is a different type of leisure whose feedbacks are writing on these pages. I had the privilege to have such times of leisure on my own, while getting to know a bit more about my own city. It was a fantastic ride which I am interested in taking quite a number of times in the future as well, a purposeless piece of curious traversing.


Exploring the reason of “explore”


What I want to explore through this particular essay is how to be good at knowing what the stakes are for understanding your experience in a city when you are an aimless female traveler, or more importantly a ‘Flaneuse’. The usual question before everything would be, who is a Flaneuse? In order to understand that lets just lean a bit more towards the book written by Lauren Elkin (2016) where she indefinitely gives the title to a female version of a Flaneur – which is the original title given to a male “dawdling observer” roaming around the streets aimlessly. To be a woman and an aimless observer on the streets of any city would intentionally breach the line of public-private webs constructed by the spiders of expectations riddled and controlled by the people of this world. To loiter freely, you must have a purposeful sense of pleasure which usually even feminists miss out on while trying to figure out ways of bringing more stage space and city space for women’s representation, as mentioned in Shilpa Phadke’s “Why Loiter” (2011). Do follow the “Why Loiter” campaign, it is really quite resourceful and interesting.


Interestingly, I captured neighborhood spaces being hugely occupied by men for leisure.


Loitering and Intrusions


It is a difficult process to loiter and breach the expectations of - developing a homogenous “global city” space for the ambitious capitalists, especially if your embodiment is the first thing which creates a sort of hindrance to your escapade. When your body is the first private that becomes public, you need to understand how the world would react to your opening-up stunt. Being a casual wanderer often emancipates as well as manipulates us into being absent in our “situated selves” as explained by Simone de Beauvoir in her text “The Second Sex” (1949), whereby we disentangle ourselves from the established restricted and “othered” embodied experiences which we are supposed to experience according to the patriarchal hegemony. The chance to free oneself of such experiences means somehow untethering oneself from the gawking gazes of any spectacular individual present on the planet, and just become the true “main character” that we consistently think ourselves to be. Sadly, Fiona Vera Grey’s “Men’s Intrusion, Women’s Embodiment” (2016) teaches us the harsher known dimensions of being untethered to your bodily self and randomly being lost inside your head, where obviously the more independent-self resides in. Intrusions on our thought processes and our embodiments are a continuous effort to keep us bound into body images and mental mechanics with which a “woman” should operate. This really is a fault in the system of reproducing knowledge rather than inhabiting practice within the biased human race. Now you might ask, how come? Are humans already biased towards these gender judgements? If we go by the quote “One is not born, but becomes a woman”, it is the constant practice of subjugation that possibly makes us thorough with the behaviour and attitude or bodily enactments expected of us. So, while we are on the road, on the bus or even inside any other public place like parks, gardens or anything - we keep thinking somehow, we are being watched, not only externally but internally as well. It is the dynamics of structural processes channeling their puppetry magic on our conscience to “correct” our public demeanor. So even if you are out and about in the public space, navigating locations and keeping to your business, people would love to intrude those spaces – either through harmful intents which are the obvious (any sort of abuse or harassment) or through questioning “Gazes”.


Why do you think we stopped caring about missing girls?



My Literal Experience


Now comes the more interesting part, which I have experienced and used myself to navigate or explore public spaces while not making myself feel like an outsider. It is rather important for you to understand how photography helps you take a stand for yourself – making it an agent of exploration, an active member of the particular scene you are in. You should be knowing; photographs actually allow people to express about places and situations better than words or sentences. That is why “photo-voices” are such significant means of carrying out research. Photo-voice is a specific method by which critical dialogue and knowledge about neighborhoods could be gathered, wherein community members with whom these projects are carried out as participatory research practices, could channelize their issues and concerns by giving their versions of spaces and places (Wang & Burris, 1997, p. 370, as mentioned in Carpenter, 2022). Photographs are good engagement tools and are quick distractions as well. It helps you belong by telling your stories as mentioned above, not only for people in communities but also for yourself. Telling stories through photos derives a sense of belongingness which women usually might not be too comfortable with, especially at the public spaces. If not to generalize much, it could be seen this way that not all countries give women such a chance to be their selves out and about and be world-class at “street haunting”.

Some of my street hauntings


How you belong?

Photography allows you to leave your mark at places where you want to make yourself comfortable in. By marking out territories of your own, you are claiming your space and also making that place suitable enough to carry a continuous history of your presence and your embodied belongingness – which could further become an example of lived experience for others who would want to claim their spaces in such areas/places/spaces. It is essential to show that you belong and belonging could be loud (through protests or just intense bubbly gossiping) or it could be hideous (that is my point of interjection – photography). You see why I call photography to be hideous is because I got away with it for a couple of times myself when I have been exploring my own city – which is a fundamental part of belonging – that is knowing where you live, the how part is a different business. Photography has confused individuals (men and women, queers and children alike), who have stopped to look at what I have been so mesmerized to look at and have been crucially disappointed to find out that it is just a regular lamp post or a tree. They have confused me for agents of the government, by giving me glaring glances when I have tried to take pictures of smaller neighborhoods.

You belong with photography because you allow yourself to immerse in every inch of the space your lenses capture. It gives us an impetus to be us, sharpen our creativity and to let people know you belong, by making others uncomfortable.

Process of “In-siding”


Process of unknowingly become an insider, belonging in spaces that are not really meant for you. People begrudgingly try to shrug you off, but ultimately fail to remove you bodily as well as spiritually. If you have seen “Shutter”(2008), you would be knowing how embodied and empowering images can be, because they literally hold memory. Memory of belonging, memory of taking space and memory of making you uncomfortable. I know it was a weird pop-culture reference but trust me we always cannot let men be those casual lurkers on the streets, who would not require “security” to belong at every space/place. The “pyschogeographers” have always been more of a fraternity who could actually read the moods of streets, record experiences of their voyages and be unafraid of when they could be groped, teased or assaulted (Elkin, 2016). It is high time we break such fraternities and become active collaborators of utilizing and exploring cities by walking and mapping places which were once known not care for us. I liked the way how Leslie Kern documented her embodied experiences of motherhood and pregnant self, how she claimed spaces and the struggles she faced while she did that, in her work “Feminist City”(2019), and please do refer to the movie “Kahani”(2012) for understanding the vision of a pregnant woman exploring an unknown city for the first time, although she had an agency for survival, but you might understand the concept of taking up space and embodied experiences. If there is another firmly excellent piece of cinema which you could refer to about exploring cities and claiming space, then you must definitely watch “Queen” (2013): where an Indian girl goes to an unknown city and rediscovers herself through her life changing experiences in a solo honeymoon trip. Understanding of belonging and being an insider is crucially dealt with, and of course about embodied experience.


Yet I understand that I have a privileged position, therefore interpretation of city spaces through various intersectional voices belonging from different socio-economic and socio-political positions should equally voice their opinions, through their own agency, to cultivate a different meaning of a city that they want to imagine considering they could first liberate themselves from the bounds of public/private dichotomy of captivity. Thereby this syllabus is a must read. Share as much as you can!


Ladies' zone in Lion's Safari Park, at Rabindra Sarobar, Lake, South Kolkata, India.


The art of seeing, random lane of Hindustan Park, Kolkata, India.


People watching at gariahat bus stand, Kolkata India



Practical

So, people of all ages and especially women, do yourselves and favor and please adhere to this last bit of the syllabus that has been curated for you. This is the fun part actually, so I am going to list them down right here and all you have to do is to implement them in real life:

• Take your cellphone or disposable camera and get out of your house

• Stand in front of any random lane at any time of the day (if you are uncomfortable at night, try late evening)

• Specifically dress as casually as possible

• Do not try to feel awkward if people look at you

• Start clicking pictures of random things, if possible, of windows and doors or even streets

• Look as involved as possible

• Feel your surroundings

• Claim yourself as a part of it

• Be aware of who is looking and who is not

• The more heads turned, the more discomfort created, more points scored in belonging

• Sit anywhere, at unexpected places with yourself or with friends

• Click pictures of them




• Check out the Instagram of @CityGirlsWhoWalkDelhi and @WomenWalkAtMidnight, they do interesting activities of walks in groups for claiming spaces. Get inspired.

Now you are an expert at being an insider through photography.


Suggested Readings to catch up on:

• Beauvoir, S. de. (2015). The Second Sex. Vintage Classics.

• Carpenter, Juliet. (2022). Picture This: Exploring Photovoice as a Method to Understand Lived Experiences in Marginal Neighborhoods. Vol 7, No 3. Co-Creation and the City: Arts-Based Methods and Participatory Approaches in Urban Planning. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v7i3.5451

• Elkin, Lauren. (2016). Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. Farrar, Straus and Giroux – New York

• Grey, Fiona.V. (2016). Men’s Intrusion, Women’s Embodiment. Routledge Publications

• Kern, Leslie. (2019). Feminist City: A Field Guide. Between The Lines. Toronto.

• Phadke, Shilpa; Khan, Sameera & Ranade, Shilpa. (2011). Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. Penguin Books.

Pop Culture References:

• Kahani (2012) Directed by Sujoy Ghosh

• Queen (2013) Directed by Vikas Bahl

• Shutter (2008) Directed by Masayuki Ochiai

  • Instagram handle of Women at Leisure:




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