Twin Sisters with Cameras: The Photographic Archives of Lina-Bina

Currently on display at Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre, Kolkata, the exhibition Twin Sisters with Cameras brings together the work of Manobina Roy and Debalina Mazumder, endearingly known by the moniker ‘Lina-Bina’.

Born in 1919, the sisters were recognised as among the earliest women photographers in India. At a time when women were almost invisible as participants in public spaces, Roy and Mazumder were enabled formative access to all-male preserves such as the Maharaja’s durbar in Benaras, where they grew up. The siblings’ father Binod Bihari Sen Roy introduced them to the darkroom, encouraging their photographic proclivities. He bought them their first cameras, following which the sisters went on to create a large body of images. These images primarily drew from their interior, domestic lives as well as the public realm during frequent trips abroad.

Curated by Sabeena Gadihoke, Mallika Leuzinger and Dr Tapati Guha-Thakurta, the exhibition focuses on the photographic “doubling” apparent in the sisters’ portraits of each other and their families. Here, credits blur and profiles melt into each other, as a shared multitude inhabits their frames.

Drawn from the collections of their family members, Joy Bimal Roy (Manobina’s son) and Kamalini Mazumder (Debalina’s daughter), who have partly witnessed the making of—and have preserved—the archives, the exhibition is a posthumous showcase of an alternative gaze in twentieth-century amateur photography in India. The photographs attest to the sisters’ archival instincts as they carefully selected, catalogued and captioned their images, thus inscribing themselves into the photographic script. The images also circulated through camera club networks such as the Postal Portfolio, thus placing them in esoteric photographic conversations.

In this episode of ‘In Person,’ co-curator Dr Tapati Guha-Thakurta walks us through the exhibition space, introducing the viewer to the cultures that bred and informed the twins’ photography (mostly in resistance to extant cultures of studio portraiture), thereby shedding light on the entanglements that resulted in a shared passion for capturing forms and lines against the play of natural light.

^{(Featured Image: Installation view of Twin Sisters with Cameras at Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre, Kolkata. 2022. Courtesy of Anuja Mukherjee.)}

Streamed live on 17 March 2022. 

To read more about women in photography in India in the early twentieth century, click here, here and here.