Peeking into the eyes of heroic women

Some things that happen by accident can change the very course of a life. JR, the French photographer, was a man who drew graffiti until he found a camera in the Paris metro, and began to fool around with it. On Thursday, a screening of JR’s film Women are Heroes was held at the Alliance Francaise.

The film took the audience on a tour of different parts of the world, where women struggle to meet the ordinary needs of a family — educating and keeping children secure, and providing for the old and the young. From the narrow alleys of the slums of Rio de Janeiro, JR travels with his camera to the streets of Cambodia, to poor living quarters in Kenya, the Ivory Coast and Delhi.

Everywhere JR goes, he trails women with his camera, and the women speak to him of their lives and their struggles. Many of JR’s frames capture the eyes of women, in expressions sometimes stark, sometimes playful.

In Cambodia, he documents the struggle of a teacher of art who has taken in several orphaned children, and is faced with eviction from her home, as the government goes about violently acquiring land. It is a story quite familiar. A six-year-old girl in Rio talks of her dead father, and describes dreams. She articulates, with the mannerism of a woman, the fact that it would be hard to grow up in her violent neighbourhood, where brutality is routine. Yet, her dream is to live right there, to celebrate many birthdays with her widowed mother and grandmother, and grow up to be a model and doctor.

JR, a photographer who prefers to remain unknown, is renowned for blowing up his photographs of every day street life and then putting them up on the facades of buildings, wrapping them around trains. This brings art on to the streets, which he thinks of the ‘largest art gallery in the world’. By incorporating the lives of ordinary people in his art, he offers to his subjects a sense of worth and dignity, and prods them to think of a life beyond mundane struggle.

Speaking as part of a panel that led the discussion about the film after the screening, author Christina Daniels said that even though the subjects in the film led rather bleak lives, the film itself appeared to show them — and the audience — the beauty and colour in everyday struggle. Nishant Ratnakar, staff photographer with DNA, also part of the panel, commented that art work depicted in the film served the purpose of thrusting many issues of representation and self-worth among the poor to the fore.