The Native Types – Flirting, 2006
Pushpamala N
Composition.Gallery
Untitled (17), from the series Acts of Appearance, 2015-ongoing
Gauri Gill
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
Photography arrived in India in the mid–19th century under British rule. The camera, mostly in the hands of colonial officers, missionaries, and surveyors, was used to document landscapes and people: the subjects of empire. Even after independence, photography in India remained closely tied to journalism and the work of documenting reality, rather than artmaking.
However, since the 1980s, women artists in India began using the medium differently. They carried the camera through protest marches and city streets, into family homes, disappearing forests, and Indigenous communities. Some turned it on themselves. Others staged elaborate self-portraits, collaborated with painters, transformed photographs into books and sculptures. The photographs they made feel less like records and more like relationships.
Today, their influence can be felt across India’s rapidly expanding photography scene. A new generation of women is picking up the camera, while artist-led workshops, independent photobooks, and small photography publications are all popping up across the nation. Meanwhile, photography was a major focus at this year’s India Art Fair, while the Chennai Photo Biennale, founded in 2016, is growing in stature. It all points to a medium in the midst of remarkable reinvention. Meet eight women photographers who invite us to see India from within.
Pushpamala N.
B. 1956, Bengaluru, India. Lives and works in Bengaluru.
Motherland (After calendar painting by Jesudoss), 2004 -2008
Pushpamala N
Nature Morte
Intrigue / The Betrayal, 2012
Pushpamala N
Nature Morte
In her photos, Pushpamala N. steps in front of the camera to create meticulously staged images she calls “photo romances.” Witty, theatrical, and slyly political, she casts herself as popular goddesses, heroines, housewives, and historical figures, borrowing the visual language of Indian mythology, Bollywood films, studio portraiture, and colonial ethnography, to restage some of India’s most familiar images.
She is known for landmark series including “Phantom Lady,” “Mother India,” and “The Arrival of Vasco da Gama,” revealing how photographs shape ideas of gender, nation, and identity. In the latter series, she re-enacts José Veloso Salgado’s famous painting of the Portuguese explorer’s arrival in India in 1498, casting herself as Vasco da Gama. History, she suggests, is a performance too.
Beyond her artistic practice, Pushpamala N. is a sought-after lecturer and was the founding artistic director of the Chennai Photo Biennale. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Sooni Taraporevala
B. 1957, Mumbai. Lives and works in Mumbai.
Bombay, or Mumbai, is the lifelong subject of photographer and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala. Depicting both its streets and architecture and the intimate world of her Parsi family, she has spent four decades building a visual archive of one of India’s smallest yet most influential communities. “My photographs are fueled by great affection,” she told Artsy in an interview. In writing the screenplays for major feature films like Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, and The Namesake, she created a love letter to the city in photographs as well as film. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitworth and Tate Modern in the U.K. She is currently writing the screenplay for a biopic on photographer Vicky Roy, who grew up on the streets of Delhi.
Ketaki Sheth
B. 1957, Mumbai. Lives and works in Mumbai.
Committed to black-and-white analog photography for more than three decades, Ketaki Sheth has built a remarkable portrait of India through its people. In “Bombay Mix,” she photographed the streets of Mumbai, while for “A Certain Grace,” she documented the Sidi community—descendants of East Africans who have lived in India for centuries. In “Flashback,” she offers intimate behind-the-scenes portraits of Bollywood and Tollywood stars at the height of the 1980s studio era, while “Photo Studio,” her first major body of color work, captures India’s analog portrait studios, which are on the verge of disappearing. “I am drawn to people because I think I am good with them,” she said to Artsy in an interview.
Sheba Chhachhi
B. 1958, Harar, Ethiopia. Lives and works in New Delhi.
The Initiation Chronicle, 2001-2007
Sheba Chhachhi
Volte Gallery
Sheba Chhachhi picked up the camera as a young feminist in Delhi’s women’s movement, photographing protests, marches, street theater, and feminist leaders, particularly in her iconic series of black-and-white photographs “Seven Lives and a Dream.” This work came at the height of campaigns against rape and dowry deaths in the 1980s, appearing not in galleries but on posters and pamphlets, carrying the movement into homes, universities, and workplaces. Over the decades, her practice expanded into photography, video, and installation. In Ganga’s Daughters (1992–2002), she made portraits of women who renounced family life to become Hindu ascetics and she has also created fantastical photo collages and meditative photo works on water, migration, and ecological change.
Gauri Gill
B. 1970, Chandigarh, India. Lives and works in New Delhi.
Gauri Gill photographs lives that are often overlooked. Having initially worked as a photojournalist, in 1999 she chose to step away from the news cycle, whose deadlines left little room for the long relationships she wanted to build. It was then that she began “Notes from the Desert,” her long-running series of portraits of women and girls across Rajasthan, which would win her the Prix Pictet in 2023.
Later, she expanded into collaborative work in “Fields of Sight,” where Warli artist Rajesh Vangad paints directly onto her photographs of his ancestral landscape, bringing together photography and the Indigenous Warli painting tradition. More recently, Gill documented India’s farmers’ movement of 2020–21. Widely regarded as one of the largest protest movements in history, Gill photographed the architecture of struggle through the kitchens, tents, and gathering spaces that lined the highways after protesters were barred from entering Delhi.
“The caravan of struggle is big and broad,” she said. Gill is represented by James Cohan in New York and Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, and her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern in London.
Navjot Altaf
B. 1949, Meerut, India. Lives and works in Bastar, India, and Mumbai.
Artist and ecofeminist Navjot Altaf has dedicated her career to examining the human and ecological costs of a model of development shaped by industrialization and extraction. Her practice is shaped by decades of visits to Bastar, Chhattisgarh, one of India’s most deforested and heavily mined regions, and by the enduring friendships and collaborations with Indigenous artists and communities. These ways of living have profoundly informed her thinking around what she calls “earth democracy”: a world where human and more-than-human voices, species, and ways of knowing can coexist. Working across photography, photomontage, video, and installation, she traces the scars development leaves on both land and people. “The camera allows me to look closely, as a mode of witnessing and a way to break open the singular, authoritative gaze,” she said in an interview with Artsy.
Aradhana Seth
B. 1962, New Delhi. Lives and works in Goa.
One of India’s pioneering production designers, Aradhana Seth has worked on films including The Darjeeling Limited, Don, and The Bourne Supremacy. Yet some of her most enduring images were made away from the film set, while traveling across India in search of locations. “I always had a camera around my neck,” she said in an interview with Artsy.
Along the way, she photographed the country’s disappearing visual landscape of hand-painted signage, which she would later collect in her photobook Sadak (2023). She returned to that world for her mobile photo studio project, “The Merchant of Images,” where she collaborated with traditional sign painters to recreate the painted photo studios of her childhood. “I wanted to slow down time,” she said in an interview with Artsy.
Dayanita Singh
B. 1961, New Delhi. Lives and works in New Delhi.
Untitled Nr.3, 2001
Dayanita Singh
MAX54 Gallery | The Global Fine Art
Dayanita Singh moves effortlessly between faces of the famous and the forgotten. From tabla maestro Zakir Hussain to Mona Ahmed, a member of India’s hijra community whom she photographed for more than a decade, to her own mother, she returns to the same subjects over years.
Yet her real subject has always been photography itself. She transforms her images into accordion-fold books, modular wooden “museums,” and freestanding structures that can be endlessly rearranged. “I felt that in acquiring a single image, [museums] were plucking one note out of my symphony,” she wrote in an entry on her website. For Singh, photographs are made not as single images, but in sequences, each rearrangement opening another way of seeing.
One of India’s most internationally acclaimed photographers, Singh has also been a generous champion of younger artists, supporting emerging photographers alongside exhibiting at institutions including the Gropius Bau in Berlin, MUDAM Luxembourg, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.
