Portraits of Pamela

So what does Bordes's camera tell us? That there are prostitutes in Bombay, widows in Vrindaban, religious transvestites in Pondicherry, that women work in papad factories, beautiful girls take part in fashion pageants, that there are exploited film extras, brides burnt for dowry by some women in burgas who survived the Bombay riots . . .

All very pat, but these are just the kind of images of India the West likes to uphold. After all, these

pictures will be shown at several exhibitions around the world for the next two years.

However, to be fair, the lady does not resort to gimmicks, even by way of clever captions. In all honesty, she remains direct and to the point with her titles: Pop Star, Helicopter Factory, Lijjat Factory (women's co-operative), Village Migrant and so on.

But honesty alone does not make for good photography - especially for one who claims to have trained under Peter Beard and Mirella Ricardi in Africa, Ralph Gibson in New York, David Bailey in London, and Raghu Rai in New Delhi.

Bordes has also had her pictures on African tribal and wild life published in the Washington Post and The Independent. In an effort to leave behind her colourful past, she ''disappeared'' for five years to Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Botswana.

Apart from this exposure, Bordes's claims to be a photographer include ''hitch-hiking with strangers on trucks, travelling on UN Hercules planes, parachuting, being in the war zone, terrified, watching men and women being shot, dogs skinned alive'' and ''being shot at several times''!

Her sense of composition, lighting, framing, editing, not to mention timing, scarcely justifies even a day's tinkering with a hot-shot camera. And as for her treatment of women, Bordes is naive.

Instead of trying to capture the spirit of womanhood through the highs and lows of joy and disappointments, achievements and setbacks, Bordes is content with merely repeating cliches. She does not offer a single frame which seems remotely fresh, or original.

But then, reinforcing stereotypes in photography is always convenient. For that is what sells best. Nobody wants to see, for instance, a girl in salwar-kameez riding a scooter down Indian streets.

Like the leper who peddles his sores, photographers must show a suffering India.

Bordes can, perhaps, be forgiven as she too needs to make money. But what defies explanation is when she turns downright derisive or even mocking in her approach. What, for instance, does a close-up of a derriere (with nothing else in the frame) have to do with the context of her show?

An out-of-focus picture, Pop Star, taken against the light, is in equally bad taste. Her sense of aesthetics abandons her in titles like Exorcism and Goddess With Devotee. Lijjat

Factory is so grainy that the print should not have left the darkroom.

It is not as though pretty pictures were expected of Bordes. When she shows a grotesquely scalded woman in Bride Burning, the anxiety to shock the viewer is understandable. But when inmates of a home for the elderly are shown eating, she does not need to call it Last Supper, just because Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting is framed in the background.

There is yet another aspect no creative artist or feminist can afford to overlook: the woman as a mother, wife, sister, or daughter. It forms part of a cultural upbringing that every Indian woman, for better or for worse, relates to very strongly.

Unfortunately, this escapes Bordes completely. Being a woman photographer, she was in an eminently privileged position of ''seeing'' women as women, and not as ''subjects'', like male photographers. After all, there is no medium as intimate as the camera for probing into levels beyond the obvious.

Ideally, Bordes should have cut loose from all the ''education'' she is supposed to have received. Had she let her imagination run riot her pictures would have been refreshingly spontaneous, lively and exciting, rather than appearing painfully held, studied, and often contrived.

This element of ''staginess'' becomes all the more apparent when Bordes's camera insists on looking either up or down at the women subjects. Very rarely does it relate to them on the level - a problem that is typical of what is understood as an ''outsider's view'' in photography.

Clearly, Bordes feels, she does not belong to India. And this distancing from her subject makes her work look all the more dry and soulless. However, on the surface, it would appear that the lady was in a tearing hurry, searching for the elusive Indian woman.

So she had to rush to Garhwal to picture the Chipko activists, move to Bombay for the prostitutes and film extras, travel to Vrindavan for a shot of the widows, then on to the Airforce training school in Begumpet, catch the nuns in Pondicherry training in martial arts . . .

Yet all she had to do was look out of her window. The Indian woman is everywhere: in the marketplace, on the streets, in the banks and offices, temples and factories, in courts and hospitals . . .

Every woman photographed appears to be conscious of Bordes's camera. So much for her claims to using a Leica with a powerful rangefinder and noiseless shutter!