The Most Famous
PHOTOGRAPHERS from India
This page contains a list of the greatest Indian Photographers. The pantheon dataset contains 148 Photographers, 1 of which were born in India. This makes India the birth place of the 18th most number of Photographers behind Netherlands, and Cuba.
Top 2
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Indian Photographers of all time. This list of famous Indian Photographers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity.
1. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 - 1879)
With an HPI of 67.46, Julia Margaret Cameron is the most famous Indian Photographer. Her biography has been translated into 41 different languages on wikipedia.
Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle; 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was an English photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorians and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. She was born in Calcutta, and after establishing herself among the Anglo-Indian upper-class, she moved to London where she made connections with the cultural elite. She then formed her own literary salon in the seaside village of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Cameron took up photography at the age of 48, after her daughter gave her a camera as a present. She quickly produced a large body of portraits, and created allegorical images inspired by tableaux vivants, theatre, 15th-century Italian painters, and contemporary artists. She gathered much of her work in albums, including The Norman Album. She took around 900 photographs over a 12-year period. Cameron's work was contentious. Critics derided her softly focused and unrefined images, and considered her illustrative photographs amateurish. However, her portraits of artists and scientists such as Henry Taylor, Charles Darwin and Sir John Herschel have been consistently praised. Her images have been described as "extraordinarily powerful" and "wholly original", and she has been credited with producing the first close-ups in the medium.
2. Dayanita Singh (b. 1961)
With an HPI of 38.10, Dayanita Singh is the 2nd most famous Indian Photographer. Her biography has been translated into 14 different languages.
Dayanita Singh (born 18 March 1961) is an Indian photographer whose primary format is the book. She has published fourteen books. Singh's art reflects and expands on the ways in which people relate to photographic images. Her later works, drawn from her extensive photographic oeuvre, are a series of mobile museums allowing her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from her interest in the archive, the "Museums" as she calls them, present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are full of both poetic and narrative possibilities. Publishing is also a significant part of Singh's practice. She has created multiple "book-objects" – works that are concurrently books, art objects, exhibitions, and catalogues – often with the publisher Steidl. Museum Bhavan has been shown at the Hayward Gallery, London (2013), the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014), the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2014) and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2016).
People
Pantheon has 2 people classified as Indian photographers born between 1815 and 1961. Of these 2, 1 (50.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Indian photographers include Dayanita Singh. The most famous deceased Indian photographers include Julia Margaret Cameron. As of April 2024, 1 new Indian photographers have been added to Pantheon including Dayanita Singh.
