DECODING DRAUPADI
Content · #ShowDontTell
Show, Don't Tell
A library of stock images of brown women living full lives, because search results didn't show us.
Diversity. Equity. Inclusivity.
If you're aware of the underrepresentation of brown women.
If you want to build an inclusive narrative.
If you're passionate about representation.
#ShowDontTell was created for you.
Try this
A quick exercise to see which women get represented.
Run a Google image search for any activity. Picnics. Bachelorettes. Boardrooms. Pools. Beaches. Travelling. Adventure.
White women? Black women? The world wide web and the Google search engine are rather imperialist and racist. Not just with babies' hands.
Unless you explicitly look for women of other ethnicities, you'll be hard pressed to find even one in fifty images that represents us. And that is not okay.
Think about a young child in Mumbai making a presentation on women's empowerment. Or a blogger looking for stock images for a post on bachelorette party ideas. What will the child think if all they see are white women?
On a blog, what impression do those images make? That only white people are clickable? That only they live a certain kind of life? That being brown is the sum total of a brown woman's identity, that she lives on the margins while white is the default?
We hang out. We go to clubs. We celebrate the end of our singledom. We are leaders. We relax by the beach. But we are nowhere to be seen.
What we did
We stopped waiting for the algorithm to fix itself.
As changemakers, we couldn't sit back and wait for the world to come around: for someone, somewhere to realise that representation matters everywhere, in the digital world too, and fix their algorithm one issue at a time.
So we built the pictures ourselves. We worked with photographers on theme-specific shoots and put together a library of stock images of brown women, to be uploaded to stock image sites under three collections.
The Work Edit
Women at work. Baristas, founders, cab drivers and everyone in between.
Out and About
Women out in the world simply being themselves: exercising, driving, playing a sport, anything at all.
Together
Women sitting together, chatting. In college, at a picnic, in cafes, at parties.
Our first campaign
The Decoding Draupadi photoshoot, with photographer Saurabh Jain.
The library
A crowd-sourced library of brown women stock images.
Restocking the web, one picture at a time. These are some of the images we made.
Want to use one of these images? Write to us at ak@c4e.in.
