The Story
OrganizerWhen the Delhi Photo Festival opened in October 2011, it was the first international photography festival India had ever had. Conceived and curated by the photographers Prashant Panjiar and Dinesh Khanna under the aegis of the Nazar Foundation, a Delhi-based photography organisation they co-founded, the festival set out with a clear ambition: to take photography out of galleries and museums and put it in front of a broad public that was not used to seeing art at all.
That first edition, hosted in collaboration with the Visual Arts Gallery of the India Habitat Centre, was built around the theme Affinity and brought together the work of more than thirty-five Indian and thirty-nine international photographers from around two dozen countries, across some ninety-four exhibitions and slideshows. Crucially, much of it was staged in the Habitat Centre's open, high-traffic spaces, so that thousands of ordinary visitors encountered the images. The festival received international coverage from the outset, which was especially valuable for the Indian photographers it showcased. Alongside the exhibitions ran a rich program of talks, panel discussions, workshops and portfolio-review sessions led by figures such as Raghu Rai, Pablo Bartholomew, Dayanita Singh, Ram Rahman, Shahidul Alam and Sohrab Hura.
The festival returned biennially. The 2013 edition took the theme Grace, chosen in honour of the fashion photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta, a major supporter of the festival who had died suddenly in 2012. The third edition, in 2015 on the theme Aspire, moved to the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and featured more than forty photographers from around the world alongside a masterclass program. By its own account, three editions in, the Delhi Photo Festival remained India's largest and most successful international photo festival, and its organisers spoke of planning a fourth edition while pausing to address questions of relevance, inclusiveness and sustainability. That fourth edition did not ultimately proceed, and the festival has been dormant since 2015; its status is recorded here as unverified pending confirmation.
The Delhi Photo Festival holds a foundational place in the story of Indian photography. As the country's first international photo festival, it created a large, public, non-commercial platform for photographers at a moment when few existed, and it deliberately democratised access by staging work in open, high-footfall spaces rather than exclusive galleries. It gave Indian photographers international exposure and jury attention, and its programming, pairing exhibitions with serious talks, workshops and portfolio reviews, helped build a professional ecosystem around the medium. Perhaps most importantly, its success directly inspired a wave of photography festivals and biennales across India that followed, from Chennai to Puducherry and beyond.
Even in dormancy, the Delhi Photo Festival matters as the pioneer that seeded India's photo-festival culture. The Chennai Photo Biennale, PondyPHOTO and other events that came after all built on the space it opened. Its model, public, accessible, internationally connected and rigorous, remains a reference point for how to present photography to a wide audience. For the Atlas, it is an important historical node in Indian visual-arts culture, recorded honestly as a landmark on hiatus whose influence outlived its own run.
