08.25.08

Shahi Mohalla III
by Kate Orne

Since 2000 I have worked among the neediest people in Afghanistan and Pakistan using photography as a tool to fight against indentured slavery and for the wellbeing of women, children, and animals. My commitment to social causes has become the defining part of my life as an artist. I have worked on several essays in South East Asia where the poor are sentenced to lives of disease and want. Throughout, I have been documenting their struggles in photos — using art as a connection to wider awareness in the outside world.

In 2005 I began working among sex-workers and their families in Pakistan — being the first photographer to document this shunned community. This body of work examines the uneasy peace between Islamic fundamentalism and profanity in these brothels, wherein repressive fundamentalist Muslim laws not only shun the existence of these women but in some areas punish their actions by death. However, in these brothels the women are the breadwinners. This underlying dualism surfaces in portraits of the women sitting proudly on the same beds where they not only service their customers but sleep at night with their husbands and children.

I use this project to raise awareness about this little known community, and to raise funds for two small schools which are the first ever to offer education to the children of these sex-workers, with the goal of breaking the cycle of children born into prostitution, sex abuse, drug addiction and crime. There are currently 80 students enrolled.