Dwelling in Photography: Intimacy, Amateurism and the Camera in South Asia

This project traces the development of photography as an everyday practice in South Asia, focusing on women’s engagements with the camera in and beyond the household.

What was it like to look at the world through a camera for the first time – and what, specifically, was it like for women in twentieth-century South Asia? How did this technology shape not just their visions, but also their sense of self, their sense of others; who did it bring them into contact with? What histories – of gender, race, class, caste, family, empire and nation – were sparked, and sustained, by seemingly little gestures and acts like stopping to photograph figures on the foggy streets of London, or submitting a portrait of a toddler scampering across a south Indian living room to an Urdu women’s magazine published in Lahore? What did it mean for two teenage girls who had never left the princely state of Ramnagar to participate in transregional photography clubs whose reach extended to present day Afghanistan? Why would an elderly woman frantically disperse the albums and burn down negatives she had compiled over decades? And what happens when her photographs are nonetheless retrieved by her great-grandson and through his painstaking digitisation, begin to circulate on the internet and as part of the contemporary art scene?

These are the questions I grapple with in Dwelling in Photography, an ethnographic and art historical study of intimacy, amateurism and the camera in South Asia. At its heart are Haleema Hashim (1928 – 2017), a woman from the close-knit migrant community of Kutchi Memons who had settled in the port city of Cochin, and the peripatetic Bengali Hindu twin sisters Manobina Roy (1919 – 2001) and Debalina Mazumder (1919 – 2012). These women photographed for decades, with Hashim commandeering a camera gifted to her husband by a business acquaintance and teaching herself how to use it, and the twins learning photography from their father, who was a member of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and had his own darkroom. In contrast to studies that distinguish between ‘public’ and ‘domestic’, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, ‘professional’ and ‘hobby’, ‘document’ and ‘art’, ‘practice’ and ‘archive’, and sequester ‘women’s work’, I argue that their photographic lives upend these very categories. By taking seriously the intimate and amateur character of their images, moreover, I excavate the radical potential of the photographic encounter even when Hashim, Roy and Mazumder emphasised their adherence to the status quo and sought to reproduce particular models of domesticity and femininity. Such an approach also contends with the reconfiguration of their photography by descendants, journalists and the founders and users of crowd-sourced, open-access digital archives. 

In fact, my study is as much about tracing particular photographic lives as it is about taking stock of the artistic, intellectual and social-entrepreneurial regime in which amateur photography accrues value and meaning. I consider initiatives ranging from international conferences dedicated to advancing scholarship on “women in photography” to NGOs seeking to empower women in the Global South through the gift of a camera. As such, this project inquires into the limits of how people dwell in and on photography, and opens onto more capacious visions of gender, postcolonial modernity, technology and archives.