On the margins of the Indian Ocean:

This article analyses the practice and presence of photography in Goa, and by Goan photographers outside of Goa, from the 1850s to the 1900s. One of the aims of this text is to draw a preliminary mapping of Goan photographic histories beyond its most well-known chronologies and geographies – beyond Souza & Paul’s photographic studio dominating visuality of Goa from the 1890s onwards and beyond Goa itself.To write a history of Goan photographers in this period – and not only of photographers in Goa – means necessarily to leave Goa’s borders and address questions of transnational and transimperial mobilities and diasporic identities. Therefore, after an introduction where I map what I consider to be the main lenses of analysis when approaching the subject, the article is divided into three parts which correspond to three geographical spaces: the first one concentrates on Goa, on the early traces of photographic practices before the 1890s, the date when the photographic studio Souza & Paul publishes a catalogue of images for sale and starts leading the local visual culture; the second and third parts analyse the references to Goan photographers away from Goa, in two significant geographies of the Goan diaspora – in Bombay (now Mumbai), a major city of neighbouring British India, and in the East African coastline, across the Indian ocean. My approach will entail crossing those physical and colonial borders that were also crossed by photography and photographers, while also placing Goan photographic practices within the wider history of photography in India and in the coastal port cities of the Indian ocean. By doing so, it argues that the history of photographic studios can also be analysed though the lenses of an Indian Ocean history, one with thriving ports with cosmopolitan communities, and individual and collective histories of mobility and migration. Mobility itself is a major characteristic of 19th and 20th century professional photographers. This explains the enormous quantity of photographers who make images of places that are very far from their original places of birth. Goan early photographers are exemplary of this need to go beyond national histories of photography and acknowledge the diasporic characteristics of photography.