Indian Photography & Women Photographers
Who Gets to
Hold the Camera
Seventy-five years of Indian photography, followed through the women who turned the lens from an instrument of empire into an instrument of intimacy. A genealogy that runs from Ketaki Sheth's twins to Gauri Gill's desert to a younger generation now inheriting the argument and rewriting it.
I missed Photo London this year, which I still regret. But an invitation landed in my inbox, to PHOTOINK's exhibition, and it sent me down a curatorial rabbit hole I did not expect. What the gallery had made was not a survey. It was a genealogy.
A survey lays things side by side and lets you draw your own conclusions. A genealogy makes an argument about descent, about who came from whom, about what gets inherited and what gets refused. When PHOTOINK arrived at Photo London to mark its own twenty-fifth year, it did not simply show a century of Indian photographs. It traced a line. Follow that line closely and you arrive at a single question, quiet but insistent, running underneath the whole presentation: who gets to hold the camera, and what do they choose to do with it once it is in their hands.
Founded in 2001 by Devika Daulet-Singh, PHOTOINK has spent more than two decades doing the unglamorous, essential work of building a field: exhibitions, publishing, archives, the slow construction of a context in which Indian photography could be read as art rather than evidence. Its inaugural Photo London presentation spanned a century of visual language. The Ahmed Ali Archive's monumental record of Bengal's factory workers during industrialisation. Dileep Prakash's pensive portraits of Anglo-Indian communities. Rajesh Vora's photographs of rooftop water tanks in Punjab, which read, once you know how to look, as a map of migration written in concrete. Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya's rephotographed love letter to world cinema. It is a wide, generous span. But the thread I could not stop pulling was the one about women, and the camera, and permission.
To understand why that thread matters, you have to start with what the camera was for. It arrived in India as a colonial tool. It catalogued land and people, fixing its subjects as things to be ruled rather than authors of their own image. That inheritance was stubborn. Even after independence, photography in India stayed tethered to journalism, treated as a record of fact rather than a form of art-making. For decades the medium remained in service to documentation: evidence, not interpretation.
The postwar decades began to loosen the grip. Photographers like Raghu Rai and Raghubir Singh turned toward a humanist, street-level documentary, using the camera to trace India's shifting social landscape as the country modernised. Their work proved photography could be more than reportage, that it could be a way of reading a nation still deciding what it was. But the deeper rupture, the one that changed the terms entirely, came in the 1980s. And it came through women.
Once women began using the camera as a tool for intimacy rather than surveillance, for collaboration rather than extraction, the whole medium shifted.
Antakly ProjectsA generation of women picked up the camera and carried it somewhere new. Into protest marches and crowded streets, yes, but also into family homes and disappearing forests, into vulnerable communities and, sometimes, back toward themselves. Some staged elaborate self-portraits. Others collaborated with painters, or folded photographs into books and sculptural objects. The resulting images did not read like records. They read like relationships: evidence of a photographer embedded in the world she was picturing, rather than observing it from a safe and sovereign distance. That was the permission structure that changed everything.
If you want to name the moment the argument became a tradition, name three photographers. They do not work alike. What they share is an instinct: that the truest picture comes from proximity, patience, and a willingness to be changed by the people on the other side of the lens.
Sheth's most quietly radical project may be the one that began by accident. When she moved to London in the mid-1990s, after her husband Aurobind Patel became design director of The Economist, she came across a directory listing some thirty thousand people who shared his surname in Britain. Patel is a name rooted in Gujarat, on India's west coast, and the sheer scale of its diaspora intrigued her. She narrowed her focus to twins, and spent three years tracking them down across Britain and Gujarat. Twinspotting was the result. Trained as a street photographer, she departed here into the staged portrait, using the strange doubling of twins and triplets to ask what sameness even means. The genius of the work is its geography: by setting the same families against the homeland and the adopted country, she lifts the project past the anthropological gaze into something far more searching, a meditation on personal and cultural identity remade by genetic and diasporic movement. See Meet the Patels in The Guardian.
Together, Sheth, Gill, and Singh set a template. Photography as a form of witness, but witness redefined: not neutral observation but embedded relationship, deep attention, and formal experiment. That is the inheritance. The interesting question is what a younger generation does with it.
The curatorial thread runs on, through a younger cohort who grew up inside this tradition and treat it not as a constraint but as something alive, to be extended and argued with. What they share with their predecessors is the conviction that closeness is a form of ethics, and that the camera earns its images rather than taking them.
Here is what struck me, once I had followed the thread all the way through. The market has a habit of arriving at a region through two or three names and declaring itself satisfied. India's photography, seen through PHOTOINK's genealogy, resists that shortcut. It is not a scene you can summarise with a marquee. It is a chain of transmission, from the women who first refused the colonial logic of the camera to the ones now aiming it at child marriage and dying rivers and the trust between strangers.
The through-line is not a style. It is a stance: that to photograph someone is to enter into a relationship with them, and that the relationship, not the image, is the real work. That is a quietly enormous claim to have built a seventy-five-year tradition on. It is also, I think, exactly why this work has taken the market so long to catch up to. Intimacy does not photograph like spectacle. It asks you to slow down, to come closer, to stay.
If this genealogy pulled you in the way it pulled me, the archive goes deeper. Antakly Projects has been sitting down with photographers for over two decades, the famous and the about-to-be, talking process, obsession, and what the lens does to a life. You will love the collection: Photography Interviews & Inspiration at Antakly Projects.
I missed Photo London. But the rabbit hole was the better journey, and I am grateful to PHOTOINK for digging it.
