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Photography in India Biography
WITHIN a few months of the announcement of the first daguerreotype in Paris in 1839, photography had arrived in India. The effects were explosive: the new medium rapidly found enthusiasts, and by the 1850s photographic societies (some with their own monthly journals) as well as a number of thriving studios had sprung up in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras; and by 1855, the East India Company had decided to replace its draughtsmen with photographers.
The photographs in these two books — catalogues both, Vidya Dehejia's of a major show held at the Smithsonian's Sackler and Free galleries, John Falconer's of an exhibition held at London's Brunei Gallery — testify handsomely to the technical and aesthetic quality of the work that resulted from the Indian embrace of photography. They are very largely concerned with European photographers who worked in India, though the work of Indian photographers does figure at the edges (Dehejia has a chapter on the Indian master photographer, Lala Deen Dayal). Both books draw their material largely from the collections of the Oriental and India Office at the British Library and from the private collection of Howard and Jane Ricketts.
What did the advent of photography in India mean? Did it mark a radical disruption to and discontinuity with existing ways of seeing India? Or did, as Milo Beach asserts in his foreword to the Dehejia volume, photography do no more than provide a new and "stimulating means to explore India, not a radical change of vision"? Did photography simply reinforce European ways of seeing, or was it absorbed into an "Indian way of seeing"? How one chooses to answer such questions about rupture or continuity will depend on how one views the history of photography in India: what exactly one takes to be its identity or subject matter. A pervasive view has emerged in recent years.
This makes its own the assumption that photography has no intrinsic identify or subject matter: it is best seen as a "practice", as "a mode of cultural production", whose history is contiguous with that of the social and political uses to which it is put. In the colonial context, the camera wielded by white Europeans was an intrusive weapon of domination. It created and subjected an exotic other: roving across the fields of ethnography, history, architecture, portraiture, it produced a disciplinary knowledge that was used to rule the colonised. The products of "the colonising camera" must therefore be read in terms of "conventions and institutions", of disciplines and practices: photographs are ideological texts, to be unravelled and exposed. Yet photography was a medium that Indians came themselves to take up with great energy, one which they used to invent themselves in both their public and private lives — it was a crucial element in the spread of nationalism, as well as in the definition of the modern Indian family. Seen thus, it is hard to connect the "postcolonial" reading of the history of photography in India with its actual history over the past 150 years.
The photographs assembled in these two books are of interest precisely because they suggest, in indirect ways, different possibilities of thinking about this history. Above all, they encourage a view that would see these early photographs of India not as ideological signs of other processes, but as forms of technical and cultural experiment, whose results were not always predictable or conforming to wider political imperatives. Instead of merely being documents in an archive of colonial oppression, the meanings of this work might be recognised as more uncertain. Dehejia herself notes a degree of ambiguity regarding the status of early photography: "Current discussion among professionals centres around whether the rightful place for such works is in collections storage (where art objects reside) or in archives (home to documentary material)."
The photographs in both of these two books would certainly justify a more aesthetically directed approach. A great number of the images are, simply put, beautiful. Most have a mesmerising stillness and clarity, and one lingers over even the more ordinary ones, as they yield up secrets and surprises. Many are devoid of people; and being without colour (with one exception, a hand painted portrait of a Maharaja, the tones are sepia: ranging from a deep brown to black and white), they make a stark contrast to how India is usually photographed today. There is little sense of the palpableness of India; rather, one finds in them a concentrated, meditated vacancy, and in this respect they provide a fascinating echo to and historical reference for some of the finest work being done in contemporary Indian photography today. Some of these photographs — for instance Samuel Bourne's "Picturesque Bridge over the Rungnoo below Ging, Darjeeling" (1869) — with their flattening and extrusion of planes, have the becalmed quality of pictorial dioramas. And it is striking to see photographs by Deen Dayal — "Troops returning to Delhi" (1882-84) and "Elephant Battery in Action at Fort Jhansi" (1882-84) — , which have an epic cinematographic quality. But, from the point of view of mapping a different history of photography in India, the work of Donald Horne Macfarlane is a true revelation. Little is known about him. But his work shows a refined, sensual eye fascinated by surfaces and deep textures: even when ostensibly representational, such as his "Dutch tombs at Surat" (1860), or his photographs of foliage, his work attains an abstract quality. That quality is most fully achieved in a staggering photograph from 1862, entitled "Rocks, Darjeeling" — Jane Ricketts, in her essay on Macfarlane in the Dehejia volume is right to describe this as an "extraordinarily powerful image that must be seen as one of the most remarkable and innovative images of the 19th Century.
In the face of this rich subject matter, Dehejia's and Falconer's efforts to set out the terms for a different history of the medium as it develops in India are somewhat half-hearted — they are sufficiently constrained by the regnant protocols of "postcolonial" history not to venture too far away from these. Falconer's texts are especially useful and informative, but both he and Dehejia are driven more by curatorial instincts than by a desire for bold historiographical redirection.
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Photography in India Biography
WITHIN a few months of the announcement of the first daguerreotype in Paris in 1839, photography had arrived in India. The effects were explosive: the new medium rapidly found enthusiasts, and by the 1850s photographic societies (some with their own monthly journals) as well as a number of thriving studios had sprung up in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras; and by 1855, the East India Company had decided to replace its draughtsmen with photographers.
The photographs in these two books — catalogues both, Vidya Dehejia's of a major show held at the Smithsonian's Sackler and Free galleries, John Falconer's of an exhibition held at London's Brunei Gallery — testify handsomely to the technical and aesthetic quality of the work that resulted from the Indian embrace of photography. They are very largely concerned with European photographers who worked in India, though the work of Indian photographers does figure at the edges (Dehejia has a chapter on the Indian master photographer, Lala Deen Dayal). Both books draw their material largely from the collections of the Oriental and India Office at the British Library and from the private collection of Howard and Jane Ricketts.
What did the advent of photography in India mean? Did it mark a radical disruption to and discontinuity with existing ways of seeing India? Or did, as Milo Beach asserts in his foreword to the Dehejia volume, photography do no more than provide a new and "stimulating means to explore India, not a radical change of vision"? Did photography simply reinforce European ways of seeing, or was it absorbed into an "Indian way of seeing"? How one chooses to answer such questions about rupture or continuity will depend on how one views the history of photography in India: what exactly one takes to be its identity or subject matter. A pervasive view has emerged in recent years.
This makes its own the assumption that photography has no intrinsic identify or subject matter: it is best seen as a "practice", as "a mode of cultural production", whose history is contiguous with that of the social and political uses to which it is put. In the colonial context, the camera wielded by white Europeans was an intrusive weapon of domination. It created and subjected an exotic other: roving across the fields of ethnography, history, architecture, portraiture, it produced a disciplinary knowledge that was used to rule the colonised. The products of "the colonising camera" must therefore be read in terms of "conventions and institutions", of disciplines and practices: photographs are ideological texts, to be unravelled and exposed. Yet photography was a medium that Indians came themselves to take up with great energy, one which they used to invent themselves in both their public and private lives — it was a crucial element in the spread of nationalism, as well as in the definition of the modern Indian family. Seen thus, it is hard to connect the "postcolonial" reading of the history of photography in India with its actual history over the past 150 years.
The photographs assembled in these two books are of interest precisely because they suggest, in indirect ways, different possibilities of thinking about this history. Above all, they encourage a view that would see these early photographs of India not as ideological signs of other processes, but as forms of technical and cultural experiment, whose results were not always predictable or conforming to wider political imperatives. Instead of merely being documents in an archive of colonial oppression, the meanings of this work might be recognised as more uncertain. Dehejia herself notes a degree of ambiguity regarding the status of early photography: "Current discussion among professionals centres around whether the rightful place for such works is in collections storage (where art objects reside) or in archives (home to documentary material)."
The photographs in both of these two books would certainly justify a more aesthetically directed approach. A great number of the images are, simply put, beautiful. Most have a mesmerising stillness and clarity, and one lingers over even the more ordinary ones, as they yield up secrets and surprises. Many are devoid of people; and being without colour (with one exception, a hand painted portrait of a Maharaja, the tones are sepia: ranging from a deep brown to black and white), they make a stark contrast to how India is usually photographed today. There is little sense of the palpableness of India; rather, one finds in them a concentrated, meditated vacancy, and in this respect they provide a fascinating echo to and historical reference for some of the finest work being done in contemporary Indian photography today. Some of these photographs — for instance Samuel Bourne's "Picturesque Bridge over the Rungnoo below Ging, Darjeeling" (1869) — with their flattening and extrusion of planes, have the becalmed quality of pictorial dioramas. And it is striking to see photographs by Deen Dayal — "Troops returning to Delhi" (1882-84) and "Elephant Battery in Action at Fort Jhansi" (1882-84) — , which have an epic cinematographic quality. But, from the point of view of mapping a different history of photography in India, the work of Donald Horne Macfarlane is a true revelation. Little is known about him. But his work shows a refined, sensual eye fascinated by surfaces and deep textures: even when ostensibly representational, such as his "Dutch tombs at Surat" (1860), or his photographs of foliage, his work attains an abstract quality. That quality is most fully achieved in a staggering photograph from 1862, entitled "Rocks, Darjeeling" — Jane Ricketts, in her essay on Macfarlane in the Dehejia volume is right to describe this as an "extraordinarily powerful image that must be seen as one of the most remarkable and innovative images of the 19th Century.
In the face of this rich subject matter, Dehejia's and Falconer's efforts to set out the terms for a different history of the medium as it develops in India are somewhat half-hearted — they are sufficiently constrained by the regnant protocols of "postcolonial" history not to venture too far away from these. Falconer's texts are especially useful and informative, but both he and Dehejia are driven more by curatorial instincts than by a desire for bold historiographical redirection.
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
Photography in India
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