National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore and Alkazi Foundation is hosting an exhibition that acknowledges Homai Vyarawalla’s photography as she has captured the nation’s infancy and its development.
National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore and Alkazi Foundation are celebrating a woman who has preserved India’s history in her photographs. The gallery is hosting an exhibition that acknowledges Homai Vyarawalla’s photography as she has captured the nation’s infancy and its development as it headed towards Independence and beyond. The Alkazi Collection of Photography has extended their valuable collection to this.
Being the first woman press photographer of India, her perspective towards photojournalism is rather different. She says that in her times, photography had its own essence, she had been a proud photographer and the fact that she got published in the newspaper motivated her to go further and embrace her skill as a photographer. “I always liked to do something new. There was nobody around to teach us this kind of stuff so I had to learn through a trial-and-error method. I got paid Re1 per photo and that inspired me to continue my journey.”
Homai Vyrarawalla’s photographs extend from socially off-hand pictures to politically-intense state of affairs which have a lot of historical significance. The collection includes pictures of the first time our national flag was hoisted at the Red Fort, the meeting where leaders voted for the June 3 partition plan, the departure of Lord Mountbatten and the funerals of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri. “I did have an encounter with Gandhiji once. I did not know that he didn’t like to be photographed so when I saw him at a prayer meeting, I pulled out my camera and started clicking his pictures with my flash turned on. Once I was done, he said to his friend that he would go blind by the time he enters the room,” she recollected.
Although it had been a priceless part of her life, Homai Vyrarawalla had to bow out of the profession in 1970. “The press had given up coming onto the field and people had started criticising the press a lot, so I chose to walk out of this profession gracefully.” All these years, her collection had been hidden in the confines of her close. Now she has been rediscovered across the country.
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