Photographer David Trattles had heard about the “girls that box” on a Canadian radio show. Intrigued, he cycled down with his camera to Calcutta from Delhi, which he was then visiting, to meet these Muslim women boxers. He found them: their club, the ring, their homes. In Calcutta, Trattles had wanted to spend just enough time for “tea and temples”. He stayed for days instead, his camera recording a unique story.

The Boxing Ladies, an exhibition of 60 photographs in black and white at Seagull (Jan 24 - Feb 3) , is a body of work that tells this story. The images, many of them showing the girls training, boxing, running, have in them a nervous energy and pace, reflecting Trattles’s fascination with motion. Trattles’s style is simple, yet fickle: his maverick images have an unpredictable edge, which is refreshing and exciting. For instance, Trattles shows a marked interest in his subjects’ hands, unravelling, and sometimes teasingly concealing, truths through their gestures. The exhibition features a clever mix of small (8x12) and large prints (9x13), breaking the monotony with some inspired irregularity. The pictures are paired imaginatively, and shot in muted light. Trattles perhaps suggests that it is always dusk in the lives of his heroines.

But Trattles’s real strength lies in his capacity as a raconteur. The Boxing Ladies has been divided into various sections — club, home, ring and so on, each picture an engaging dialogue with the viewer. The pictures in the ‘Club’ series give the impression of a secluded space curiously free of oppressive stereotypes — the gate at the entrance tied together with coir rope, weights strewn carelessly on the floor, a boxer untying her hand-wraps with Bruce Lee and a pumped-up Schwarzenegger frowning at her from the wall, sometimes the girls and boys training together.

The camera then pans on to ‘Home’, the inner world, where, too, the female boxer continues her fight. There are doting parents alright, a proud father in a skull cap holding up a fading photograph of his daughter. But the boxer has to keep her gloves on, for when she stands facing the camera inside this private world, her face lighting up in a self-conscious smile, behind the protective wall against which she stands one sees intrusive faces through the shaped openings in the wall, watching, waiting for her spirit to break.

Then there is the series titled ‘Ring’, the portal of victory and defeat, revered and feared by the women. It is also their biggest strength. And when a bout is over, after the final bell, all that the boxer does is lie down, cross her arms over her eyes, shut out the world, and rest. It has been a long day. This, for her, is home and she loves it here.