A spotlight on the deserving

In a continued celebration of World Photography Day, Samyukta Lakshmi, our guest columnist, traces the journey of pioneering Indian women photojournalists and explores what the future holds.

Photography arrived in India in the 1830s due to the British. While they used the medium to document the land, the people and events during their reign, it was an important propaganda tool in their colonial machinery. By portraying colonised countries as exotic far-away lands that needed intervention, they were able to justify their brutal conquests at home and gain support and funding for further campaigns.

The first decade of photography in India saw the emergence of photo studios that were accessible to only a select few members of the ruling classes.

The beginning of the 20th century marked the emergence of photojournalism in India. Photos from this period shaped our visual history and showcase an important period while India was transitioning to a democratic nation. Many groundbreaking Indian photographers were part of this tradition and I would like to focus on a pioneering woman photojournalist — Homai Vyarawalla.

She documented some of the most significant moments of the Indian freedom struggle and produced iconic photographs of political leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Lord Mountbatten. Meeting her in my hometown Bengaluru and hearing her speak about her work was one of the pivotal moments of inspiration in my career. Her work is especially important considering the era in which it was produced and the enormity of the challenges she may have faced. To say she operated in a male-dominated industry would be a gross understatement.

Around the same time as Ms Vyarawalla, two sisters from Bengal, Debalina Mazumdar and Manobina Roy, made images that showed the inner worlds of women and their domestic life. The twins started making photos with the encouragement of their father and photographed family holidays, and their environment. They not only developed their photos but were also archivists who selected, catalogued, captioned and preserved their photographs. Their work ‘Sunday Afternoons in Hyde Park’ and ‘Impressions of Moscow’ are their most striking photos of everyday life in pre-Independence India.

Coming to present-day India, I had the pleasure of chatting with three contemporary photographers, Gitika Talukdar, Vaishnavi Suresh and Prarthna Singh.

Gitika Talukdar is a photojournalist from Assam who has covered important events like the 2023 Olympics in Tokyo and the 2018 FIFA world cup. She is currently in Australia covering the Women’s FIFA world cup. She was introduced to photography by her grand uncle who was a renowned filmmaker in Assam. Gitika loves the thrill of being a sports photojournalist; she especially enjoys the travel and meeting some of the biggest sports stars. She challenges herself to dispel ignorant misconceptions about women photographers with her talent, creativity and focus. While she has to jostle hard for space with her male colleagues at her shoots, she is never one to be pushed around.

Gitika Talukdar.

Vaishnavi Suresh fell in love with photography while studying filmmaking in college. She started as an event photographer and moved towards documentary photography while working with NGOs. Her current project follows the impact of Gautam Adani’s development projects all over the country. She has covered the effects of these projects on the environment, the health of people, and the land and bemoans the lack of coverage of this story in the mainstream Indian media.

Early in her career, Vaishnavi felt out of place working in the male-dominated music festival space. Her acceptance by her colleagues in the environmental and human rights beat validated her decision to change track. As a woman photographer, Vaishnavi feels her biggest advantage is while telling stories of women. Working at resettlement camps at Hasdeo, the displaced woman opened up to her about their challenges. Their stories surprised Vaishnavi’s male colleagues who were not aware of the women’s reality despite visiting them many times.

“There is still a lot of sexism,” she chips in. While working with a fishing community, her work was compromised when she was not allowed to accompany the male fishermen more than twice, despite having researched extensively on the subject. When she works in remote rural areas, she feels unable to step out after sunset, unless accompanied by a man.

Vaishnavi Suresh.

Prarthna Singh is a Mumbai-based photographer. She was always interested in the arts and was introduced to photography by her mother and grandmother. They would take portraits of the family during holidays and picnics, using a Minolta and a Roliflex.

She is deeply invested in stories where women are finding themselves in spaces previously inaccessible to them and making a mark. Her work explores the convergences between feminine identity and strength. Her latest work — ‘Har Sham Shaheen Bagh’ is about the well-known Muslim women-led protest in response to the Citizen Amendment Act and captures an extraordinary moment in our political and contemporary history. The work, which chronicled the women's courage and self-empowerment, was a turning point for her as an artist.

Since the stories she tells are often set in rural and patriarchal settings, Prarthna has to make sure things feel safe before she embarks on a project. She usually makes sure she tells a loved one where she’s travelling to and asks her editor for a local fixer or editor to accompany her.

Prarthna Singh.

The future of photography in India seems bright and promising. Several photographers from marginalised communities and women are making the craft more accessible and taking it to the deepest corners of the country. As more and more women photographers take their rightful space in the industry, one hopes this will bring about a perceptible change in the way we view the world. 

The author is a documentary photographer and photojournalist. Her works have been published in the New York Times, Der Spiegel and Bloomberg, among others. Find her on Instagram @samlaks

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