Early studio photography was, by and large, a man’s world: men were the owners, photographic technicians, assistants and invariably the clients who flocked to the growing number of studios worldwide. There were a few exceptions — in the 1840s, the British botanist, Anna Atkins, daughter of the zoologist-photographer, John George Children, quickly found the cyanotype useful in reproducing “objects as minute as many of the Algae and Confevra”. Though these were early days, by the 1860s, a few women joined or opened photographic establishments in and around London. In India, Lala Deen Dayal had the foresight to set up a zenana section in his studio at Secunderabad (the Nizam’s capital) that was exclusively for women, often in purdah, headed by Mrs Kenny-Levick, whose husband was a correspondent for The Times.

In Chhobi Tola, Siddhartha Ghosh carries an 1899 write-up in the Amrita Bazar Patrika of the Mahila Art Studio and Photographic Store, “a thoroughly secluded studio for ladies under Sreemuttee Sarojini Ghosh”, who had clearly undertaken orders for the newspaper that “leave no doubt as to her efficiency and ability as a photographer”. She deserved “the encouragement and patronage at the hands of her countrymen”. Misogyny apart, the fact that a leading newspaper of the times found it important enough to mention the existence of such a studio was indication enough that there clearly was a growing female clientele in Calcutta. Though the zenana studio, a must in purdah society, allowed women the social and physical space necessary for them to take advantage of the new technology, it is unlikely that the entire staff in these studios were women.

In India, the expanding photographic establishment catered not only to those in the service of the raj: the entry of the photograph into the domestic sphere coincided with significant familial and spatiotemporal changes across class and cultural boundaries. That the colonial encounter could never be resolved easily in terms merely of hierarchy, dominance and subjugation is evident from a detailed examination of any family history of the emerging middle classes, irrespective of whether they were Western-educated or not. Those from more traditional stock as well as from reformist backgrounds quickly adopted the Victorian obsession with obedience, cleanliness, punctuality and personal hygiene. As women adapted to the demands of the companionate marriage, studio photographs of the conjugal couple with or without children and, among the more progressive who did not quail at the thought of a visit to a male-dominated studio space, of the woman on her own, became important social markers. These were framed, placed in albums and exchanged among friends and relatives, announcing the emergence of the nuclear family and of the woman who could be selectively viewed outside the home.

Soon enough, women who could afford it and had the opportunity learnt photography and became proud owners of early cameras. Reflecting back on the many-faceted life of her mother, Jnanadanandini Debi, the wife of civil servant Satyendranath Tagore, Indira Debi wrote that her mother had learnt photography at the well-known Bourne & Shepherd studio in Calcutta. Around the 1880s, she took photographs of women members of the family and household of whom there were no other photographs — nor any chance of their being photographed subsequently. While there is no information on the camera that she might have used, it is likely that she would certainly have owned a Kodak Brownie, that simple and inexpensive camera which Sabeena Gadihoke (who has worked extensively on early Indian women photographers) believes brought women worldwide into the sphere of photography.

At a time when Indian women were just entering middle-class professions as teachers, nurses and doctors, handling of the camera was largely a leisure activity, domestic photography being the predominant focus. Sreemuttee Sarojini Ghosh was clearly the exception and even as late as the first few decades of the 20th century, there was no question of women opting for photography as a profession. On the other hand, in Britain, as access to public spaces was more liberal, by the end of the 19th century a handful of women could seriously consider photography as a professional option. Documenting the work of early women photographers in Britain, Val Williams makes the significant observation that, by 1890, the place of women photographers in social documentary photography and in pictorialism was already established. Pictorialism was a complicated oeuvre whose emphasis on emulating painting and etching required a soft focus and considerable dark-room work. With their interest in nature, flora and fauna, it is not surprising that women innovated as they photographed the single daffodil in an ornate vase or a nymph-like figure reaching out to a sheaf of wheat while a miasmic background fades away. Studio portraiture dominated till well into the late 19th century and there were also experimenters — the portraitist, Julia Margaret Cameron, took pleasure in transporting her sitters into the land of fantasy: scullery maids became holy virgins, village girls dressed in period costume posed as Arthurian damsels.

World War I and the suffrage movement galvanized British women to visually record what they recognized as momentous periods in their lives. Christina Broom, who photographed in the early 1900s — and called herself a “press photographer” — covered a large range of subjects, suffragette processions of 1909 being an important one. Olive Edis was the first woman to be officially appointed to document the Great War and she interpreted her role as one that concentrated on documenting “busy and accomplished women” who nevertheless appear to be working in an unflurried manner “servicing, maintaining, tending a private sphere quite separate from the actual theatre of war”. In this she combined her feminism with a strong professional expertise to create a powerful documentary of women’s work. By the 1930s, when the professional woman photographer in the West was a familiar presence, a few women — mainly in Bengal — had also started photographing seriously.

Sabeena Gadihoke makes the interesting observation that in a middle-class world of conservative norms, “photography allowed women to do things that they normally did not do. It allowed them to wander, to look and to stare”. The camera legitimized their presence in the public sphere, often breaking with the family tradition of purdah. By the 1930s, two sets of sisters — Mira and Indira Moitra (later Mira Chaudhuri and Indira Dey) and the twins, Debaleena and Manobina Sen (later Debaleena Mazumdar and Manobina Roy), — developed considerable proficiency in the growing world of photography. While Mira became a prodigious archivist, filling several albums with her images, Debaleena and Manobina were published in journals such as The Illustrated Weekly of India.

None of them was a professional; that role was first taken on by Annapurna Dutta who, by the 1920s, was running a business from her home in Calcutta and supporting her family with earnings from photography. Annapurna did not have a professional studio with a name and an address, and ran a one- person show where she single-handedly managed everything — taking photos, processing negatives, and lending finishing touches to the prints. Interestingly, her oeuvre comprised chiefly women still ruled by the strict norms of purdah, several important Muslim families being among her clients. In this self-portrait, with sari pallav resting just so on her head to reveal waves in the style of the day — paata kata — and gold bangles on her right hand — Annapurna could have been the bhadramahila next door, caught amidst attending to household chores. Yet, though her appearance may have been representative of a housewife, the image of Annapurna Dutta with the massive machine became an iconic image of the independent woman of those days. In this carefully composed photograph, Annapurna’s hand holds the lens cover, her fingers positioned so that it is evident to the lay observer that the glass disc is connected to the protruding lens. Though she looks away from the camera, her extreme involvement with the equipment is palpable. As a woman treading onto a male-dominated field, it was imperative that the new role did not fracture too radically existing stereotypes: it would take many years — and the second phase of the women’s movement — for professional women’s dress, demeanour and interaction to forge new parameters and, in fact, expectations.