Early Bombay Photography By Susan Hapgood
Title – Early Bombay Photography
Author – Susan Hapgood
Publishers- Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad
Year- 2015
Photography first arrived in India in the mid-1940s, not long after its invention in Europe in 1839. It arrived both in Bombay and Calcutta, perhaps almost simultaneously. Already by the 1850s, more Indians were practicing this new method in Bombay than anywhere else in the country or perhaps in Asia.
Early photographers, many of them British, were captivated by what they saw as an exotic and vast land. Armed with bulky, backbreaking cameras, glass plates, and an almost obsessive curiosity, they set out to document landscapes, monuments, and people.
Studios flourished, and photography became a shared medium, one that captured not only how India was seen, but how it saw itself. The author Susan Hapgood is an art historian and curator based in New York who lived in Mumbai from 2101-214.
