Re-photo

I have to admit not knowing the name Homai Vyarawalla before I read today of her death at the age of 98.  She  had the distinction of being India’s first woman photojournalist, though most of her pictures were published under the name “Dalda 13”, according to Wikipedia chosen because she was born in 1913, married at the age of 13  and her first card had the number plate ‘DLD 13.

However in an interview for the Indian Frontline magazine she says that she first met her husband,  Manekshaw Vyarawalla, when she was 13, but they were not married until 15 years later (There is another good interview with her in The Hindu.) He was interested in photography, and she studied painting but became interested in the pictures he was taking and sending to the press. She began working with him, both in taking pictures and in the darkroom, and  when she was 25 or 26 took some pictures of the girls from her art school on an outing which were the first pictures taken on her own that were published. But many of her early pictures were taken when out with her husband when he was working on his stories, and she would grab his Rolleiflex to take pictures, which were then published under his name.

She became well known as a photographer during the war years, when both she and her husband worked in Delhi for the Far Eastern Bureau of the British Information Service and were also allowed to freelance for magazines. 

She took her last photograph – of Indira Ghandi – in 1970, around a year after her husband’s death. She left the profession partly because of the changing attitudes of photographers, who she felt no longer behaved with dignity and followed the rules, but also because of the increasing security that was making it difficult for photographers to work freely in the way she had been used to.

Not only was she the first woman to work in this field in India, she seems for many years to have been the only woman to do so, and it was only in the 1980s, a decade after Vyarawalla had laid down her camera, that a second generation of Indian woman photojournalists emerged.

A retrospective of her work was shown in 2010 , curated by Sabeena Gadihoke, and there have been numerous articles following her death, including in City Journal, The Hindu, and The Times of India.  You can watch a lengthy documentary about in which this remarkable woman talks at length, but is perhaps rather disappointing in showing little of her actual work.  Perhaps the best way to get a good idea of this is Google’s Image Search, where most of the black and white images on the first few pages are by her.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Photo History, Photographers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.