Portsmouth Open: Monica Dhaka

Before You See the Scar is a photography project created in 2026 with 18 acid attack survivors from the Brave Souls Foundation in India. I wanted to challenge the way we look at survivors and ask one question: who do we see first, the woman or the scar?

In this project, I see the body as an archive. A scar holds a memory of what happened, but also of healing and the life afterwards. Survivors are often shown only through pain. We rarely hear what they want or how they want to be seen.
The project has two parts. First, I photographed close-up sections of the survivors’ healed skin. Without any information, the photographs can look like landscapes, textured surfaces, tree rings or stone. I wanted people to appreciate the textures, colours, folds and patterns before knowing where the images came from.

In the second part, we finally meet the women behind these surfaces through their portraits and short texts based on my interviews with them. Their words tell us what they want and how they want the world to see them, because they are more than their scars. Choosing smiling portraits was a very conscious decision. I wanted to celebrate these women instead of showing them through pain or sadness.

Only then does the viewer understand that the first images are not landscapes. They are photographs of someone’s skin. The viewer goes back to the images and sees them differently. This journey of looking, finding out and looking again creates the feedback loop in my project. Together, the photographs and interviews form an archive of the women’s bodies, voices and lives.

The project does not show the violence of the attack. It focuses on the women, their strength and their lives beyond their scars.