Overview
- The 19 August date commemorates France’s 1839 public disclosure of the daguerreotype process and is now used globally to celebrate photography’s role in documenting people and places.
- The idea of an annual World Photography Day was proposed by Indian photography teacher O.P. Sharma in 1988 and first observed in 1991, which fixed 19 August as the recurring date.
- Photography reached India very quickly after 1839, with cameras advertised in Calcutta and early images produced by about 1840, and foreign photographers such as Frederick Fiebig and Thomas Biggs documenting monuments and landscapes.
- Raja Deen Dayal built a large professional practice from the 1870s, secured elite patronage including photographing the Prince of Wales in 1875, and ran a Bombay studio that the Royal Ontario Museum says employed more than 50 people.
- Coverage for 2026 is commemorative rather than reporting new discoveries, emphasizing how early photographers recorded architecture, rituals and everyday life and why preserving scattered 19th-century archives matters for future research and public memory.