Siddharth Shanghvi on Farrokh Chothia celebrating the female form

The chances of Farrokh Chothia's female subjects knowing the phrase "fire-retardant bra" are negligible. Add to this list: Librarian. And canticles.

Indeed, his subjects seem more capable of starting fires­ - their gaze at his camera has an inflammable quality.

This achieves two things: Such plain, bold, clean directness gives them the strength that male photographers often strip off their subjects. His women are lions; they are gazing out at no predator. No, I'm not advancing a feminist trope here­ - that his subjects are not objectified, or that the photographer is sensitive to how swiftly this can happen when men photograph women.

I believe I don't need to. Second: It establishes that, sometimes, for an artist to love his subject, art must act as the intermediary. The camera is an interlocutor between lust and reason, with reason winning over and inviting dignity over to dinner. It can also mean that the camera is a keeper of beautiful secrets.

For Chothia's best pictures are not the ones we see but we hope to see, of tendrils of cigarette smoke in a room where the bed springs are damaged for reasons other than obesity. Of someone standing at the window, and of someone else slumped on a cane chair, wondering whether to stay or whether to leave - the passcodes of intimacy that establish all relationships are tentative. But those pictures are not here, not right now. The photographs we have here are of women who are confident and true, with traces of dark chocolate and lava.

The back story is conjecture. His contemporaries are often said to capture women more effectively; the referenced photographs are soft, languid, painterly, with a monsoonal air of longing. Is it possible such photographs impart women with air-brushed vulnerability that makes the men around them safer in their masculinity?

These women are staring out of the window, waiting (perhaps for a lover, or the postman, or because they are so bored around the photographer they're looking out at a ravine full of tigers, with every intention of jumping into it).

Meanwhile, Chothia's images are simpler, cooler, honest, erotically proficient. They reminded me of French critic and writer Catherine Millet, who went around Paris frequenting sex clubs, giving Saturday afternoons to cheap Chablis and bondage.

One important denouement of Millet's resultant memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine Millet, was how she could fornicate several times a night - if she willed - but no male partner might physically achieve the same (the will was there, the body was lacking). This makes an excellent case for the historic subjugation of heterosexual female sexuality, a subject that Chothia might know little about.

I think he might even be the heroic champion of women's sexual freedoms but I could be entirely wrong; his photographs seem to evidence this, however.

Photography, in politically correct times, is afraid of looking at this broad spectrum of sensuality that goes from ankle exposure to full on tit assault: Body as weaponry.

Maybe this is because women are often considered ammunition, but seldom as a weapon unto themselves. This marks Chothia's photography, a departure from this idea, as singular, and the visual equivalent of a vesper martini, clear and heady.

Norman Mailer said of Truman Capote that he was "the most perfect writer of my generation". Take Breakfast at Tiffany's - who might have had so blessed out and screwed up a life as Holly Golightly, who went shopping when she had a panic attack?

Capote's style was his subject, the guitar strum paragraphs of dialogue, the tap dancing on the page. Likewise, Chothia's style suffers annoying graduations of perfection, grain for grain. His subjects, as you see here, are women who inhabit a parallel universe, where physical perfection is landing the ovarian lottery tax-free, with consequences.

These are women who will walk into a room, in a bathrobe, and the light on their ear lobe will hold you, terrify you, you will think of leaving your wife, your kids, your job, the sweet little expense account life you set up in the suburbs.

Wait. Hold off.

The beings from this parallel universe, where Farrokh Chothia's hazards trespass, thanks to his genius, are not yet ready to leave it, or to leave with you. Not yet.

All you have are photographs, which might make an easier possession; they will endure.

Also read - Why do Indian men go berserk over the female form?