Images & Text by Lucia Jost
For four weeks, I travelled through South India, from Mumbai to Kerala, moving between cities, villages and family homes. I was drawn to the spaces in which young women live, grow, care for one another and imagine their own futures. These photographs emerged from encounters with sisters, daughters, mothers and friends — women whose lives are shaped by tradition, but also by a rapidly changing society.
In my photographic work, I am interested in the relationships that exist beneath the surface: the intimate bonds between women, the spaces they create for one another, and the quiet forms of solidarity that hold everyday life together. Across very different cultural and social realities, I found a familiar language of closeness. In kitchens, courtyards, bedrooms and on the streets, women shared jokes, secrets, gestures of care and moments of freedom. These women-only spaces became places where another kind of world could unfold.
The title Devi, Sanskrit for “Goddess”, refers to the divine feminine in Hinduism. For me, it also became a way of thinking about the women I encountered. Not as an idealised image of femininity, but as individuals carrying contradictions, expectations and desires. They carry families, traditions and care work, while at the same time negotiating education, independence, sexuality and their place within a changing India.
The series moves between different generations and realities: between rural and urban life, between inherited traditions and new possibilities. Some of the young women I met are still hoping for access to education, greater independence or basic infrastructure. Others are already moving confidently through modern cities, studying, working and shaping lives increasingly separate from traditional expectations.
My photographs do not attempt to define what it means to be a woman in India. Instead, they look for the intimate moments in which individual lives become visible: a sister leaning against another, friends preparing for a celebration, a mother watching her daughters. Through these encounters, the personal becomes a portrait of a society in transition.
The work continues my ongoing photographic exploration of female perspectives, intimacy and the spaces women create between one another. Whether in Berlin or South India, I am interested in women not as isolated subjects, but as part of a network of relationships. These connections form an invisible architecture of care and belonging.
Daughters of Devi is a love letter to the young women I encountered: to their humour, tenderness, strength and resilience, and to the quiet worlds they build together. Across language and cultural difference, the photographs search for a universal experience of female connection — a bond that becomes visible whenever women are given the space to simply be with one another.
Lucia Jost is a Berlin-born and based portrait photographer working primarily with analogue photography. Her work combines documentary observation with staged composition to explore female perspectives, Berlins subcultures, and everyday intimacy. Central to her practice is the relationship between women and the urban space. Her Photography explores how Big city shapes the emotional reality of her generation. Sisterhood and Community are recurring motifs throughout her work, which aim to be both poetic and politically. With her work she is giving visibility to female identity and coming of ages themes.
www.luciajost.com
