(In)visible Subjects: Pranlal Patel's Women at Work in Ahmedabad, India, 1937

Abstract

Abstract Approximately one hundred photographs of women at work in the city of Ahmedabad, India, were taken in 1937 by Pranlal K. Patel, at the request of the premier women's social reform organization, the Jyoti Sangh. Rather than depicting women's contributions as peripheral to the productivity of Ahmedabad's economic life and isolated from the public, Patel pictured women as subjects working in the city's major marketplaces and as integral to the city's industrial productivity. This article argues that historical photography may provide what Elizabeth Edwards terms a “historiographical think-space” that challenges conventional historical sources and the narratives they produce. By engaging Ariella Azoulay's ethical spectators in the civil contract of photography, historians can use historical photography to confront the historical roots of inequality that shape our world today.