Womanscape: Everyday Lives, Timeless Strength
The exhibition will remain on view until April 10, free and open to all, with viewing hours from 3 pm to 6 pm on weekdays and 11 am to 6 pm on Saturdays.
HYDERABAD: A woman stands in the doorway of a small house; women in public transport, in daily life, in friendships — sharing sorrow and joy, laughter and tears. One with a dog, another with a child. Their worn‑out feet, colourful sarees, eclectic jewellery, barefoot — lives lived unarranged, unkempt, undone. Women in motion, at work, in the everyday — the working class in frame.
This sense of the everyday formed the core of the exhibition, as chief guest and musician Vidushi Vidya Rao noted. “International Women’s Day began with a strike by immigrant women textile workers in Massachusetts in 1912. Their slogan was ‘Give us bread, give us roses too.’ They were asking not just for work and survival, but for leisure, beauty, poetry, friendship, for dignity,” she said, adding, “In these photographs, I see that idea of ‘bread and roses’, the essential and the beautiful coming together.”
She was speaking about photojournalist Kandukuri Ramesh Babu’s Womanscape, presented as part of the Women’s March at Goethe‑Zentrum Hyderabad, inaugurated on Monday. Although captured by a man, the photographs do not seek spectacle or turn women into symbols or victims. Nor do they glamourise or reduce them. They return again and again to the middle of life, where women stand, sit, walk, wait, feed, talk and rest.
The exhibition will remain on view until April 10, free and open to all, with viewing hours from 3 pm to 6 pm on weekdays and 11 am to 6 pm on Saturdays.
“I don’t see my work as ‘capturing’ images. I am one among them,” said Ramesh Babu. “This is not about stealing moments or cropping lives. It is about bringing their lived realities into my frame.” He also rejects the term often used for such work. “What is seen as ‘the street’ by the first world is simply our everyday life. For us, this is a lived experience.”
That closeness to everyday people comes through in how the images are built. Amita Desai, founder‑director of Goethe‑Zentrum Hyderabad, spoke about that attention in her remarks. “This exhibition is a homage to the extraordinary that exists within the ordinary,” she said. “We cannot celebrate women without acknowledging the reality of life and the unjust world we continue to create. Ramesh Babu’s work celebrates women in their everyday lives, in their spaces, in their multiple roles, and in what may seem ordinary, but is in fact extraordinary.”
Also a chief guest, artist Thota Vaikuntam kept his response brief: “The work he has done is truly admirable. It deserves to be appreciated wholeheartedly.”