Photography in India refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in the geographic region of modern-day India.

Photography was introduced in India by the British in the early 19th century. The earliest photographers were patronized by the British government and the rulers of the princely states.

Photography was introduced in India by the British in the 1840s. The concept of photography spread to India at a fast pace after the invention, introduction, and publicization of the daguerreotype technology in 1839. By 1840, advertisements in Calcutta by Thacker, Spink, & Co. for imported cameras started appearing in a periodical titled Friends of India. The earliest known or surviving photographic capture in India dates to 1840 and is a lithograph based on a daguerreotype of the Sans Souci Theatre in Calcutta. By the later 1840s, the first known commercial photographic studio began its operation in Calcutta. This was followed by photographic societies sprouting up in the 1850s in Bombay (1854), Calcutta (1856), and Madras (1856). The purpose of these photographic societies was to promulgate photographic awareness and understanding by holding meetings and annual exhibitions.

Notable photographers such as Felice Beato and Samuel Bourne spent several years in India, photographing Indian people and architecture. Beato covered the Indian Rebellion of 1857 in various cities, and his work has been seen as a pioneering effort of war photography. Bourne set up Bourne & Shepherd in 1863 and produced thousands of images of the architecture and landscapes of India.^{[citation needed]}

Willoughby Wallace Hooper became known for his photographs of ethnic groups, military and domestic scenes from the 1860s onwards. Among other photographers, he contributed to the ethnographic survey The People of India (8 vols, 1868–75). Around 1878, Hooper had taken a series of arranged photographs showing emaciated bodies of men, women and children, who were among the millions of victims of the Madras Famine. Having been published in Britain under the title Secundarabad, and with captions such as "Deserving Objects of Gratuitous Relief", they were caricatured by the satirical magazine Punch, criticizing Hooper for not having given any help to the people he was about to depict. Further, his photographs of prisoners in British Burma facing execution by a firing squad raised concerns about the ethical behaviour of photographers during his lifetime.

British authorities also supported efforts to photograph the various castes and tribes of India, as a way of categorising the various people of India, with racist and Orientalist undertones. The early photographers thus presented an exoticised view of India, intended to further the colonial agenda. Photographic publishing in India shifted from specialized, subscription-based albums, like The Indian Amateur's Photographic Album, to widely accessible educational magazines such as Indian Pictorial Education (launched in 1929), which became available through railway bookstalls.

The German-born photographer Frederick Fiebig became known for his photographs of buildings taken in the 1850s in Calcutta and Madras, as well as of indigenous neighbourhoods, mosques and temples. In 1856, the East India Company acquired some 500 of his photographs, which are now part of the Oriental and India Office collections at the British Library.

Lala Deen Dayal was one of the few native Indian photographers of the 19th century, and the most prolific. In the 1880s, he was appointed the court photographer to the Nizam of Hyderabad.^{[citation needed]} Other early Indian photographers such as Kulwant Roy and Kanu Gandhi documented people and events of the Indian Independence movement.