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Photography in India refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in modern-day India.
Photography was introduced in India by the British in the early 19th century. The earliest photographers were patronized by the British government and the rulers of the princely states.
Photography was introduced in India by the British in the early 19th century. [1] The concept of photography spread to India at a fast pace after the invention, introduction, and publicization of the daguerreotype technology in 1839. [2] By 1840, advertisements in Calcutta by Thacker, Spink, & Co. for imported cameras started appearing in a periodical titled Friends of India. [2] The earliest known or surviving photographic capture within India dates to 1840 and is a lithograph based upon a daguerreotype of the Sans Souci Theatre in Calcutta. [2] By the later 1840s, the first known commercial photographic studio began its operation in Calcutta. [2] This was followed by photographic societies sprouting up in the 1850s in Bombay (1854), Calcutta (1856), and Madras (1856). [2] The purpose of these photographic societies was to promulgate photographic awareness and understanding by the method of holding meetings and annual exhibitions. [2]
Notable photographers such as Felice Beato and Samuel Bourne spent several years in India, photographing Indian people and architecture. Beato covered the Indian Rebellion of 1857 in various cities, and his work is a pioneering effort of war photography. Bourne set up Bourne & Shepherd in 1863, and extensively photographed thousands of images of the architecture and landscapes of India.
The British also conducted efforts to photograph the various castes and tribes of India, as a way of categorising the various people of India, with racist and Orientalist undertones. The People of India was a multi-volume study which contained hundreds of such images. [1] The early photographers thus presented a highly exoticised view of India, intended to further the colonial agenda. [3]
Lala Deen Dayal was one of the few native Indian photographers of the 19th century, and the most prolific. In the 1880s, he was appointed the court photographer to the Nizam of Hyderabad.
Photographers such as Kulwant Roy and Kanu Gandhi also documented the events of the Indian Independence movement. [4]
Whilst the early history of the photography in the Punjab is shrouded in mystery, the first photographs taken of Sikhs of whom the identity of the lensman is known were snapped by John McCosh, a British military surgeon employed by the East India Company who had been stationed at Firozpur. [2] He snapped photographs during the Second Anglo-Sikh War between 1848 and 1849, some of the earliest known examples of war photography in history. [2] Using calotype technology, he captured images of individual Sikh persons and notable locations within Lahore. [2] In 1848, McCosh snapped a portrait photograph of the then reigning 10-year-old child monarch, Maharaja Duleep Singh of the Sikh Empire, seated on a chair in a profile pose. [2] One of the earliest photographers of the Golden Temple in Amritsar was a man by the name of Charles Waterloo Hutchinson, he clicked a photo of the site in 1856, around seven years after the fall of the Sikh kingdom. [2] Another early pioneer of photographing Sikhs was the Italian-British Felice Beato, whom had been traversing the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. [2] Some specimens he portrayed in his photographic works include Akali-Nihangs, Sikh soldiers employed in the colonial military (such as in Hodson's Horse), and various views of the Golden Temple shrine and complex of Amritsar. [2] Prominent photographers and studios who captured Golden Temple and other Sikh sites in the 19th and early 20th centuries with their lens' were Samuel Bourne (1863–65), John Edward Saché (1860s), William Baker (1864–66), James Craddock (1868–70), W. G. Stretton (1870), Baker & Burke (1872), Bourne & Shepherd (1880s–90s), A. Skeen (1900), Hannah P. Adams (1906), Herbert G. Ponting (1906), Underwood & Underwood (1908), Stereo Travel Co. (1908), and H. Templar (1910). [2]
Homai Vyarawalla was one of the notable Indian photojournalists of the 20th century.
In 2020, Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand became the first Indian photographers to win the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the protests in Kashmir. [5]
Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide. Paper texture effects in calotype photography limit the ability of this early process to record low contrast details and textures. The term calotype comes from the Ancient Greek καλός, "beautiful", and τύπος, "impression".
Samuel Bourne was a British photographer known for his prolific seven years' work in India, from 1863 to 1870. Together with Charles Shepherd, he set up Bourne & Shepherd first in Shimla in 1863 and later in Kolkata (Calcutta); the company closed in June 2016.
Felice A. Beato and Felice Antonio Beato are collective signatures used by the brothers Felice Beato and Antonio Beato, who were both pioneering photographers in the 19th century. They were noted for their depictions of everyday life in Orient.
War photography involves photographing armed conflict and its effects on people and places. Photographers who participate in this genre may find themselves placed in harm's way, and are sometimes killed trying to get their pictures out of the war arena.
James Robertson (1813–1888) was an English gem and coin engraver who worked in the Mediterranean region, and who became a pioneering photographer working in the Crimea and possibly India. He is noted for his Orientalist photographs and for being one of the first war photographers.
Antonio Beato, also known as Antoine Beato, was an Italian-British photographer. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, views of the architecture and landscapes of Egypt and other locations in the Mediterranean region. He was the younger brother of photographer Felice Beato (1832–1909), with whom he sometimes worked. Antonio and his brother were part of a small group of commercial photographers who were the first to produce images of the Orient on a large scale.
Hand-colouring refers to any method of manually adding colour to a monochrome photograph, generally either to heighten the realism of the image or for artistic purposes. Hand-colouring is also known as hand painting or overpainting.
The firm of Stillfried & Andersen, also known as the Japan Photographic Association, was a photographic studio founded by Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Hermann Andersen that operated in Yokohama, Japan between 1876 and 1885. The studio is noted for its portraits and landscapes that were often hand-coloured and presented in bound albums. The firm also produced photographic prints from negatives by Felice Beato.
Felice Beato, also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato's travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body of photojournalism. He influenced other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting.
Linnaeus Tripe was a British pioneer of photography, best known for his photographs of India and Burma taken in the 1850s.
Charles Shepherd was an English photographer and printer who worked in India in the second half of the 19th century. His photographs include scenes of soldiers and civilians, both English and indigenous.
Bourne & Shepherd was an Indian photographic studio and one of the oldest established photographic businesses in the world. Established in 1863, at its peak, it was the most successful commercial firm in 19th-and early 20th-century India, with agencies all over India, and outlets in London and Paris, and also ran a mail order service. A devastating fire in 1991 destroyed much of the studio's photographic archive and resulted in a severe financial loss to the firm. The long-term impact of the fire, legal difficulties with the Indian government, which owned the studio building, and the increasing dominance of digital technology, finally forced the studio's closure in June 2016. At its closure, the studio had operated continuously for 176 years.
The history of photography in Japan begins in the 19th century and has continued to be a prominent art form into the present era.
Frederick Fiebig was a photographer, best known for his photographs of India, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, and South Africa taken in the 1850s.
John McCosh or John MacCosh or James McCosh was a Scottish army surgeon who made documentary photographs whilst serving in India and Burma. His photographs during the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–1849) of people and places associated with the British rule in India, and of the Second Burmese War (1852–1853), count as sufficient grounds, some historians maintain, to recognise him as the first war photographer known by name. McCosh wrote a number of books on medicine and photography, as well as books of poetry.
Federico Peliti was a baker, confectioner, hotelier, manager of restaurants in Shimla and Calcutta, and an amateur photographer in British India. His restaurant in Shimla, Peliti's, was very popular and finds mention in numerous writings of the period including those by Rudyard Kipling. A collection of his photographs documenting British Indian life was published in Turin in 1994. He received a bronze medal from the French government in 1889 which entitled him to the title of Chevalier.
Willoughby Wallace Hooper was an English military officer and photographer, serving for near to forty years in the colonial army in southern India and British-Burma during the second half of the 19th century.
Philip Adolphe Klier, also known as Philip Klier, was a German photographer, who arrived in Burma as a young man around 1865 and spent the rest of his life there. Mainly working as self-trained photographer and businessman, Klier took hundreds of photographs at the end of the 19th century during the British colonial period in Burma. His photographs, taken both in his studio as well as on location, were mainly sold as picture postcards for foreign visitors. They have also been published in several books and collected in public archives. Among a small number of other photographers, Klier is considered as one of the earliest professional photographers in the history of today's Myanmar.
Thomas Child (1841–1898) was an English photographer and engineer best known for his pioneering photography work in China. Child produced a large body of photographs during his time in Beijing in the 1870s and 1880s, a time when virtually no other photographers operated in the city. During the two decades he spent in China, Child compiled the earliest comprehensive photographic catalogue of the customs, architecture, and people of late Qing dynasty Beijing. A keen photographer of architecture, some of Child's images are among the earliest and the only known photographic records of their architectural subjects.
Photographs have been taken in the area now known as Canada since 1839, by both amateurs and professionals. In the 19th century, commercial photography focussed on portraiture. But professional photographers were also involved in political and anthropological projects: they were brought along on expeditions to Western Canada and were engaged to document Indigenous peoples in Canada by government agencies.
