Three Women and a Camera (1998)

Two generations of women face the camera. This is a film about Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman photo-journalist for three decades from the late 1930s and two contemporary women photographers, Sheba Chhachhi and Dayanita Singh. Vyarawalla’s work underscores the optimism and euphoria of the birth of a nation, while Chhachhi and Singh attempt to grapple with complexities and undelivered promises of the post-independence era. This film debates their concerns regarding representation, subject-camera relationships and the limits and possibilities of still photography in India in the late 1990s.

Winner of the second prize at Film South Asia, documentary festival at Kathmandu, Nepal, 1999 and Certificate of Merit at the Mumbai International Film festival for animation, documentary and short films, 2000.

About the filmmaker

Sabeena Gadihoke is a Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia. Gadihoke, who began her career as a filmmaker and camera person has published on contemporary documentary films, photography, popular visual culture and female stardom in Bombay cinema. She has written a book on India’s first woman press photographer Homai Vyarawalla titled Camera Chronicles (2006). A photo historian and curator, she has curated several photo shows including a series of retrospectives on Homai Vyarawalla and Jitendra Arya at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Her most recent exhibition (co-curated with Mallika Leuzinger and Tapati Guha-Thakurta) titled Twin Sisters with Cameras on the photographs of Debalina Mazumder and Manobina Roy has travelled to several cities.

Admission free on first-come-first-served basis.

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