1840 to the present · Across India
Photography in India
Photography reached India within a year of the daguerreotype's public launch, and the earliest known Indian image dates from 1840. Its story runs from colonial survey albums and court studios to photojournalism and the photobook.
How to recognise it
- 19th-century views and portraits by studios such as Bourne & Shepherd, founded in 1863
- Court photography, such as Lala Deen Dayal's work for the Nizam of Hyderabad
- Painted photographs: prints overpainted in gouache or oil, made at the Rajput courts
- Photojournalism of the independence movement and after
- The photobook as a form in its own right, as in Dayanita Singh's work
The daguerreotype was made public in 1839. By 1840 Thacker, Spink & Co. were advertising imported cameras in Calcutta, and the earliest known Indian image, a lithograph after a daguerreotype of the Sans Souci Theatre in Calcutta, dates from that year. A commercial studio opened in Calcutta in the later 1840s, and photographic societies followed in Bombay in 1854 and in Calcutta and Madras in 1856.
Early photography in India was largely British. Felice Beato covered the uprising of 1857; Samuel Bourne set up Bourne & Shepherd in 1863 and made thousands of views of buildings and landscape. The government sponsored surveys of castes and tribes, such as The People of India, published in eight volumes between 1868 and 1875, and the pictures carry the assumptions of the people who ordered them. Lala Deen Dayal, born around 1844, was the most prolific Indian photographer of the century. He had studios in Indore, Bombay and Hyderabad, became court photographer to the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, and in 1885 photographer to the Viceroy. At the Rajput courts, painters took up the camera, and painted over photographs.
Kulwant Roy and Kanu Gandhi documented the independence movement. Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman photojournalist, began in 1938 and worked until 1970. Raghubir Singh was among the first photographers to treat colour seriously, in the early 1970s. Raghu Rai joined Magnum in 1977 on Henri Cartier-Bresson’s nomination, and documented the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984. Dayanita Singh works chiefly through the book.
What to look for
A photograph printed at the time and a later print from the same negative are different objects, and the date of the print matters as much as the date of the picture. Studio names and mounts help place 19th-century work. The images of living or recent photographers are under copyright; we describe them rather than reproduce them.
