Homai Vyarawalla

Born: 9 December 1913

Died: 15 January 2012

She commonly is known by her pseudonym Dalda 13, was India’s first woman photojournalist.
She began work in the late 1930s and retired in the early 1970s.
In 2011, she was awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award of the Republic of India.
She was amongst the first women in India to join a mainstream publication when she joined The Illustrated Weekly of India.
She started her career in the 1930s.
At the onset of World War II, she started working on assignments for Mumbai-based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which published many of her most admired black-and-white images.
In the early years of her career, since Vyarawalla was unknown and a woman, her photographs were published under her husband’s name.
Later in life, she gave her collection of photographs to the Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and, in 2010, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (NGMA), the foundation presented a retrospective of her work.
In 1998, she was honored with the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Media person.
Google honored Vyarawalla on the 104th anniversary of her birth with a doodle, “First Lady of the Lens”.