Interview with Walter Astrada

For the second year in a row, photographs by Argentine photojournalist Walter Astrada are exhibited at Visa. This year, he presents a shock report on the violence against women in India. As a photographer, he has covered numerous political conflicts, international events, but he is more interested in showing people’s sufferings.

After seeing an exhibition at the age of 13, he realized how powerful a picture can be and he bought his first camera at 18. He took photography courses in Argentina and started an internship in the newspaper La Nacion. Then, he left his country to travel around the world and worked as a freelancer.

Working in India was no small matter, especially as a man. People did not understand why he wanted to go to maternity hospitals or "cradle houses"-where parents can leave unwanted girls- and photograph women or babies. Nobody wanted to talk about something which is a taboo.

In India, women face strong social and family pressure to honor their husband with a son. Women being considered "second citizens", millions of girls have been eliminated since the early 1980s through infanticide and abortion. The preference for boys lies in a deep-rooted tradition: only boys can inherit wealth and carry on the family line. Girls are a financial burden. Their dowry and wedding cost the parents a lot of money. Besides, in order to get more money, the husband can threaten his in-laws to ill-treat or murder their daughter. There are 7000 dowry-related cases of girls being killed every year. As a consequence, a shortage of women drives young bachelors to pay an important sum of money to find a wife. Girls are bought from poor families in West Bengal or Bihar, or countries such as Bangladesh or Nepal.

Walter reminds that women are not the only victims of violence: "It's a mistake to think that only women are affected by violence. They are, physically and mentally. But violence in a family affects the children. At work, people suffering violence can't work properly. So the consequences of violence against women affect everybody. In India, it affects the whole society."

Walter Astrada's exhibition, Violence against women in India, is part of a big project. He wants to show this violence on different continents: "Violence against women is everywhere. It's not a problem of poverty, social class or religion." So Walter has worked in Guatemala (American continent), in Congo (Africa), in India (Asia), and is planning to document the problem in Spain (Europe) right after the end of the festival.

Marion Mozzi