The word ‘beauty’ has been weaponised against so many of us
Introduction
The work of the artist Sujata Setia challenges the prejudices ingrained in conventional constructions of beauty and the traditional role of women. She addresses complex and often painful issues through an aesthetic lens that encourages deeper consideration while avoiding the emotional dissociation that can arise when faced with another’s grief. Her skill lies in addressing trauma without evoking pity or even sympathy. Pity is the perspective of an assumed and insulating privilege that firmly establishes just how disconnected one is from its object. And, while sympathy certainly involves an acknowledgement of another’s pain, it goes no further than feeling sorry for their misfortune. What Sujata Setia achieves is something much closer to empathy – a sense of emotionally shared perception. And she achieves this not simply by introducing the viewer to the circumstances of each individual, but by unfolding that narrative in ways that are disarming without being sentimental.
The work draws on a range of intellectual threads from post-colonial theory to gender politics. But these are the conceptual soil in which the work takes root. The images themselves come to life through the emotional and aesthetic agency with which they draw the viewer in. And in so doing she turns narratives of trauma and misfortune into subtly powerful parables of resilience and self-redefinition.
In this interview we discuss two bodies of work. The first addresses physical difference through images of such gentle humanity that what engages one first is not otherness but a sense of connection and of a transcendent beauty that arises from the individual rather than the canons of convention. The second series takes a different approach. Here portraits of women who have suffered endemic abuse are partially revealed in a tracery that is both aesthetic and violent – the patterns cut into the photographic paper echoing the patterns of female subjugation inured by tradition. But, as Sujata Setia points out, for these women the experience of abuse is part of their life – it is not all of their life. For the potency of this artist’s work lies not in dwelling on trauma but on the potential for survival, for redefinition, and for eventual regeneration.
Alasdair Foster
© Sujata Setia ‘Ashley, James and Elara’
“I have wondered what it would be like to have more than one child, if I need to hold them both tight at the same time,” James said as he laughed casually.
Nine years ago, James lost his arm and leg in an accident.
Ashley is a congenital amputee. Which means that she was born with the lower part of her right arm missing.
“I didn’t want to have a child because I thought I wouldn’t be able to hold her. How will I support her head while feeding? How will I tie her shoelaces? Or change her clothes… but it all worked itself out. Elara realises that mummy and daddy just have to do things differently. So she works with us on solutions.”
“You know how it is… with being limb different… you just have to be persistent.” Ashley is a successful model and an advocate for families that have a limb different member. Since his accident, James has worked with Japanese gaming giant Konami to personally design and develop his own advanced bionic arm – earning himself the nickname Metal Gear Man. Since then, he’s become a speaker, BBC presenter, and model.
They have the most beautiful two-year-old daughter Elara, who truly is a ray of sunshine.
Interview
You have a background in journalism. What subsequently drew you to photography as a medium of expression?
Journalism taught me how to listen. But photography taught me how to hold silence – to be with someone’s story without the need to immediately explain it. Over time, I realised that what I wanted wasn’t to report events, but to translate emotion, memory, and trauma into a visual language that could reach people in ways words could not. My shift into photography wasn’t a rejection of journalism – it was an evolution of it.
What led you to choose the themes of the work that we will be discussing here?
Almost everything I’ve made comes from lived experience. Whether that’s childhood trauma, intergenerational violence, or witnessing the quiet resilience of others around me – these aren’t distant ‘themes’ I chose; they’re landscapes I’ve walked through. My work doesn’t start with topics, it starts with questions: What happens to a person when grief is inherited? When is silence taught? When does shame become cultural memory?
When I met Hannah for this shoot, I had to give no instructions. She asked me simply what my purpose was, and I said, “A world without exceptions.” She then went and sat at the spot against the backdrop and looked straight at the camera and her eyes; her soul spoke back to me. This is her story.
“Hi. I am Hannah. I am eighteen. I was born with a rare genetic condition called Hay-Wells Syndrome. There are only about thirty other people like me in this world. My condition has left my hair, teeth, and skin undeveloped.
It all started in college… the bullying. That’s when we become self-conscious and start noticing the differences. It was too much, just too much to bear. I developed an eating disorder as a result. I am still battling with it.
I remember retaliating if they bullied me. I knew deep down inside that it wasn’t my fault, but I couldn’t stop myself. That is what the bullies wanted. They wanted power over me. They wanted to dim my light.
But instead, I decided to dim theirs. I started to ignore them and their jokes. I have forgiven them because everyone deserves a chance to redeem themselves. Our younger self does not represent us as an adult.
If people stare at me now… which they do… all the time… then I just smile at them. I encourage people to ask me questions about my condition because I want to increase awareness about disabilities. That is why I became a model; so I could represent my tribe.
I want this world to become a collective union, where we can all embrace each other’s uniqueness. And until that happens; I promise to never judge you, laugh at you, ridicule you or make you feel unworthy… even if you choose to not do the same for me.
Because I am Me. I am kind, strong, compassionate and filled with an inner glow. Because I am more than just a rare genetic condition.”
© Sujata Setia ‘Hannah’
How did ‘Changing the Conversation’ begin?
It began as a deeply personal project, inspired by a moment with my then eight-year-old daughter. She returned from school one day and asked me if she was beautiful. As someone who grew up in a patriarchal society in a small town in India, I had long grappled with societal constructs of beauty and the rigid binaries that define our world – beautiful or ugly, boy or girl, normal or abnormal. Hearing my daughter question her own beauty made me realise that these limiting beliefs were being passed down to the next generation.
Initially, the series focused on mothers from diverse backgrounds, aiming to celebrate their unique journeys and bodies. The first shoot was with Amber, a mother who gave birth to a thirteen-pound baby and bore what I call ‘medals of honor’ on her body.
Catrin was returning from a ski trip in the French Alps, when the coach’s brakes failed and the crash happened. Ninety-six per cent of her body suffered third degree burns leaving her with a one-in-a-thousand chance for survival. Following three months in a coma, two hundred surgical procedures, and four years of rehab, Catrin defied destiny.
To the prying eyes that meet her every time she steps out of the house, she looks back at them with tenderness and empathy.
“If my scars make you feel better about yours, then I am happy for you. I understand you. And that’s what I expect from you as well. Empathy, not sympathy. My scars make me special… unique… differently beautiful. They are life’s brush strokes… and I am in love with this painting.”
© Sujata Setia ‘Catrin’
How did your ideas subsequently evolve?
The direction of the project shifted profoundly after I met Catrin, a ninety-six-per-cent-burn survivor. Her story opened my eyes to the deeper narratives of visible and invisible scars that many individuals carry. This encounter expanded the project’s scope to include people with various physical differences and life experiences, aiming to honor their resilience and challenge societal perceptions around beauty and normalcy.
Throughout the series, I collaborated closely with participants, engaging in conversations about their vulnerabilities and triumphs. These dialogues informed the portraits, which were created to present the protagonists authentically. The goal was to normalise otherness and encourage viewers to reflect on their own perceptions and biases.
Over time, this project evolved into a platform that not only showcases individual stories but also invites a broader discourse on inclusivity, empathy, and the celebration of human diversity.
Raiche was eighteen months old when she was burnt in a house fire. Being a Black British female burn survivor has come with its multiple narratives for Raiche. It is a story of marginalisation at multiple levels. A story of perceptions. “The way you look matters a lot in Black culture, so that was a long journey of acceptance for me… understanding where I actually stand. I felt like an outsider, but judgement was quick to come from other directions as well. ‘Oh, you don’t talk Black, you don’t act Black,’ I was often reminded.”
I asked her what she felt about being called an ‘inspiration’ every so often?
“Ya! I’m living my best life. I wonder sometimes when people walk up to me and say I inspire them. While I am just living my life… I somehow inspire. I guess it’s because scars have a beautiful way of telling a story… a shared story of many commons.”
© Sujata Setia ‘Raiche’
I find these images remarkable in the way in which they speak to empathy and an expanded understanding of beauty rather than pity and otherness.
That’s exactly the intention. The word ‘beauty’ has been weaponised against so many of us. I’m interested in what beauty looks like when it’s reclaimed – not for aesthetic approval, but as an act of survival. I work slowly. Conversations precede cameras. Consent isn’t a signature, it’s a process. The poetry comes from them, from the lives they’ve lived. I just make the space and hold the light.
How has this work been received by the public?
There’s been a lot of warmth, and sometimes discomfort – both are welcome. Some viewers have said the work made them rethink how they view their own bodies or the bodies of those they love. Others have questioned why we need another project on trauma. I take that as a compliment – it means the work is doing its job of unsettling the dominant gaze.
What is the thematic concept of ‘A Thousand Cuts’?
It is a visual meditation on the insidious, everyday forms of violence that women endure – violence that often goes unacknowledged because it doesn’t leave obvious bruises. It’s about the subtle, generational, almost inherited violence that is so deeply embedded in our domestic, emotional, intellectual, and cultural lives that it becomes normalised, even invisible.
The work uses symbolic pattern-cutting as a metaphor for how women are shaped – cut into – by societal expectations, by family structures, by silencing, and by deeply entrenched patriarchal – even matriarchal – ideologies.
Can you describe the cultural context in which this kind of violence is normalised and passed from one generation to the next.
I want to address the framing of this question directly, because it reflects a recurring issue I face with this work. Often, viewers will engage with it by saying, thank you for showing us your culture, as though the culture of gendered violence is something that only belongs to South Asia, or is confined to brown skins or Eastern geographies.
The truth is that the culture I depict here is not uniquely mine. It is not the private property of my ethnicity, my nation, my heritage… This culture exists everywhere. It is global. It’s in every unspoken expectation placed on women. It’s in the denial of their anger, their pain, their intellectual and emotional authority. It’s in religious doctrine, in inherited ideologies, in romantic comedies and school textbooks. It’s in the financial systems, the justice systems, and the social contracts we’ve all signed unconsciously.
What I’m inviting the viewer to reflect on is not my culture, but our complicity. The universality of this condition. This work is not a window into someone else’s world – it’s a mirror.
How did you develop the formal and symbolic language of the pattern cutting?
This emerged through many iterations – and a deep ethical reckoning. As a portrait photographer, I’ve always relied on facial expression and intimacy to anchor my storytelling. But in this work, I was faced with a profound challenge: how do I protect the identities of women who have experienced trauma, while still opening up a powerful, honest dialogue with the viewer? I needed to create both an aesthetic experience and a communicative one – without using the conventional tools I usually lean on.
How did you resolve this question?
It took time. These are stories of women who trusted me with what they were never allowed to say out loud. Survivors of domestic abuse, cultural gaslighting, emotional abandonment. I spent months listening, holding space, sometimes just being with them without pressing for narrative clarity. I wasn’t collecting stories – I was forming relationships. The work was built on mutual grief. Again and again, what each woman told me, in her own words, was some version of: I feel torn to pieces from the inside.
That raw truth became my conceptual anchor. I started researching the metaphor of death by a thousand cuts – the idea of slow, cumulative violence that depletes a person without leaving a singular, spectacular wound. Alongside this, I drew inspiration from the South Asian art of Sanjhi – a paper-cutting tradition historically practiced by the female consorts of the Hindu god Krishna, who used it to attract his attention. Even within that origin, there’s a gendered power dynamic: a silent performance of devotion and desire, executed through destruction and beauty.
Cutting into the image became my central gesture. It was a way to express the fragmented interiority of the women whose stories I was holding – but it was also something else. As a survivor myself, I wanted to understand what drives the perpetrator. In the act of making those cuts – of repeatedly and rhythmically destroying the image – I sought briefly to inhabit the psyche of the abuser. There is a terrifying rhythm in violence. A kind of meditative power. That repetition gave me insight into the psychology of control and annihilation…
…And yet, like the abuser who eventually loses control of the person they are trying to mould, the process took on a life of its own. I would begin with a plan, but once the knife touched the surface, the outcome often surprised me. The transformation was no longer mine alone to dictate.
Why did you select red as the colour of the underlay that shows through the spaces created by the cuts?
Every element of ‘A Thousand Cuts’ is a dialogue: between testimony and aesthetics, between destruction and creation, between silence and visibility. The process of making it was as much about understanding violence as it was about resisting it.
The red underlay in the portraits functions as a loaded, symbolic ground. For me, it represents culture – but not in any monolithic or celebratory sense. Red is the most visible colour through fog. It signals urgency. It’s the colour of celebration – especially in South Asia, where it dominates weddings and rites of passage. But it’s also the colour of blood, of injury, of rage. It symbolises love, but also violence. Red, to me, embodies the duality of culture: what is sacred for one, can be a prison for another. It is both visibility and obfuscation. In that sense, the red underlay doesn’t just support the image – it interrogates it. It holds space for the viewer to find their own meaning within those contradictions.
Going back to these intricate patterns, can you give an example of how these evolve conceptually?
In ‘Finding Me’, the cuts made over the woman’s portrait trace the shape of Urdu text – a direct translation of the diary entry she wrote on the day she left the perpetrator’s home. That entry was a moment of reckoning: it marked the first time in her life she truly met herself – not as someone moulded by violence, but as a woman with agency, with desires, and with the capacity to choose. She spoke of how, until that point, she hadn’t even recognised that she was a human being, worthy of dignity and self-expression. This Urdu text tearing gently across her image becomes both scar and signature. It is a record of pain, yes – but also of authorship. For the first time, she had written herself into being.
I was interested that this is the only portrait presented in colour…
One of the first things she claimed back for herself was her love for the colour red – a colour her abuser forbade her from wearing. As chance – or fate – would have it, she arrived at the photoshoot wearing red. And in that moment, I knew I couldn’t strip her of her choice once again. Hers is the only portrait in the entire series that retains its colour. All the others are rendered on the edge of monochrome, drained of vibrancy to reflect the emotional depletion of the abuse. But to desaturate this image would be to re-enact the same control she had finally escaped. Her portrait kept its colour… because she had chosen it.
That artwork uses language itself through which to communicate. In other images, such as ‘A Place to Call Home’, the cuts form a more abstracted pattern…
This image deals with something less tangible: the psychological aftermath of being denied a sense of belonging. The portrait is literally sliced open in the shape of a house – a quiet but jarring intrusion into the image. The woman’s story was threaded entirely around the idea of home – its absence, its loss, its fleeting presence. As a child, her father isolated the family, denying them even the comfort of their native language. Violence lurked within the household, behind well-dressed appearances and fluent English. Later, cast out by her mother and left unsupported, she moved between boyfriends and the homes of friends – never knowing what it meant to put down roots or feel safe.
Even after she finally found a place of her own, she confessed she didn’t know how to live in it. When you have been conditioned to feel like you don’t deserve a home, or that it can be taken away at any moment, the very idea of permanence becomes terrifying. The act of cutting a house-shape into her portrait is not just symbolic – it’s an excavation. It opens up the tension between visibility and void, between shelter and exposure. The structure of a home is there – but fragile, unstable, imposed. It invites the viewer to ask: What does home mean when you’ve only ever known displacement? And what happens when the place you finally claim as yours feels like foreign terrain?
I read something you wrote that struck me as strangely – but wonderfully – counterintuitive. You said: “grief is not my burden; this grief is beauty waiting to be translated”. What did you mean by this?
Grief isn’t a weight I carry – it’s a landscape I’ve learned to navigate. For so long, I thought grief was something to hide, something shameful. But I’ve come to understand it as a portal: a way of seeing the world more clearly. When I work with others, I don’t try to fix or soften their grief – I try to honour it. That is the best we all can do, who have moved through grief in our lives. Stop. Acknowledge each other’s grief and silently coexist in our shared space without judging or stigmatising.
In making the works we have discussed here, what have you learned about yourself that you did not previously know?
I have learned that I am not just a survivor – I am a witness. And that witnessing, when done with care, can be a form of healing not just for others, but for myself.
I’ve also learned to trust slowness. To stay in the space between what is broken and what might bloom.
© Sujata Setia ‘Raiche and Catrin’
Raiche and Catrin came together for this shoot so we could explore the concept of finding oneness in our differences. The role of finding our community, our tribe in helping us navigate the parody of life…to be… to feel… normal. Together these two amazing women have and are continuing to help redefine beauty and normalise facial differences in this world.
Biographical Notes
Sujata Setia was born in Jaipur, India, in 1982. She studied history at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, subsequently pursuing a career in television and radio journalism in India. In 2009, she moved to the United Kingdom to complete a master’s degree in international relations at King’s College London. She is a self-taught photographer. A survivor of child sexual abuse and domestic violence, she identifies ‘otherness’ as being at the core of her lived experience and, through this, her creative practice, which seeks to present a multidimensional study of othered, trivialised, and subaltern narratives. Her work has featured in twenty-five exhibitions in Australia, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
In 2021, Sujata Setia was named Photographer of the Year at the Tokyo International Foto Awards and won gold in the open section of the Association of Photographers Awards. In the same year, she won the top portrait prize at both the Independent Photographer Awards and the Indian Photo Festival, and the Fine Art Portrait prize at the International Photography Awards. In 2024, she won the creative category at the Sony World Photography Awards. Her monograph ‘A Thousand Cuts’ was published by PhotoFrome in 2025. She currently lives and works in Kent, United Kingdom.
This interview is a Talking Pictures original.