Visual Histories: Photography in the Popular Imagination
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Malavika Karlekar
Oxford University Press
174 pages, Rs 795
Not much is known about how the coming of photography to India in the mid-19th century changed visual discourse or affected people’s lives. The 32 essays in this book, illustrated with archival photographs, document this history. The camera and the studio became necessary prostheses in the new engagement between the colonised and the rulers. However, from around the end of the 1850s, as the Indian urban middle class started patronising photographic studios, these became a shared locale unlike many other public spaces that continued to be governed by discriminatory practices to do with race and gender. The book looks at the development of the studio as well as examining the role of photography in post-independence India.
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