Photography In India Research Articles

Beyond the Frame: Exploring Dimensions of Colonial Photography in India

The paper “Beyond the Frame: Exploring Dimensions of Colonial Photography in India” delves into the multifaceted dimensions of photography’s inception in India during the colonial era. Investigating photography as both an art form and a technological import by the British, it explores its role in representing and often misrepresenting India and its people. Focusing on early pioneers such as the Daniel brothers, Fox Talbot, Louis Daguerre, and Monsieur Montaino, the paper discusses the challenges of early photographic techniques and their evolution. It highlights figures like Linnaeus Tripe, John Murray, and Samuel Bourne, emphasizing their impact on documenting India’s landscapes, monuments, and social narratives during moments of historical significance like the 1857 revolt. Furthermore, the paper examines the colonial gaze inherent in early ethnographic photography and discusses the emergence of Indian photographers like Raja Deen Dayal. Overall, it underscores photography’s pivotal role in representing colonial power dynamics and cultural narratives in India, amalgamating art history, media theory, and postcolonial studies.

The Unfolding of Photography in India

The Unfolding of Photography in India

Notes on historiography of photographs from India

AbstractDespite its long and layered histories, critical analyses of photography in India began rather late and remain comparatively limited in number. However, the burgeoining scholarship in the field illuminates photography's role in conditioning modern South Asian experiences, while also highlighting the global character of the medium that complicate the unmarked history of photography. Three intertwined historiographical threads are influential in narrating the colonial Indian camera cultures. The first thread emphasized descriptive histories, the second thread debated cultural essentialism, while the third thread inquired into myriad photographic genres to rethink colonialism. An inquiry into these three threads helps reflect on the intellectual scope of photographs from colonial India, while also directing to future archival and analytical possibilities.

Civil Contract of Photography in India

Pinney’s essay explores, in the context of both colonized and contemporary India, Ariella Azoulay’s argument about the prophetic nature of photographic citizenship. The use of photographs in a number of key Indian National Congress reports reveals the destabilizing potential of the camera. This photographic counter-narrative presents a challenge to certain Althusserian and Foucauldian accounts for which the state is ultimately the arbiter of “evidence.” As Pinney shows, political claims could be advanced in the space of photography that were disallowed in everyday life. This possibility was predicated on smaller and faster apparatuses, that is, a changing technics of media. However, in contemporary India an increasingly miniaturized technics is provoking widespread anxieties about the public visibility of what was formerly private and intimate. The changing form of photographic technics thus drives a social narrative that transforms the camera as a utopian tool of liberation into a dystopian means of transgression.

Archives and Origins: The Material and Vernacular Cultures of Photography in India

Archives and Origins: The Material and Vernacular Cultures of Photography in India

Summaries of Scholarly Symposia 2.1

The Trans-Asia Photography Review is pleased to publish summaries and reviews of symposia, conferences, panels and workshops on topics related to photography in Asia. In addition to the symposia summarized here, summaries of the symposia on 19th Century photography in India held at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts can be found via their website at www.acparchives.com and abstracts from the Facing Asia conference (National Gallery of Australia, August 2010) can be downloaded at http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/facing-asia. In addition, information about the Symposium "Imperial Exposure: Early Photography and Royal Portraits Across Asia" can be found at http://www.asia.si.edu/events/IESymposium/. Please send information on other meetings that could be summarized to the Editor at asianphotography@hampshire.edu. Panel organizer and Chair: Dr. Ayelet Zohar, University of Haifa Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Things Seen by the Camera Alone Exhibiting Family, Displaying Death: Funerary Images in Contemporary Japanese Photography Re-Staging the War: Morimura Yasumasa and the icons of WWII Photographing the Cold War in the Twenty-First Century Jointly sponsored by MIT Visualizing Cultures and Harvard University’s Asia Center, Fairbanks Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Lee and Juliet Folger Fund. May 20-21, 2011 CLAIRE ROBERTST SAKURA CHRISTMAS AURÉLIE CHAMP R. KENJI TIERNEY KRISTIN STAPLETON ANN SHERIF AND WENDY KOZOL JINA KIM SE-MI OH HYUNG-GU LYNN ELLIE CHOI BAEK YUNG KIM HELEN HARDACRE JIE LI PAUL BARCLAY CHINGHSIN WU LI CHENU LENORE METRICK-CHEN JAMES T. ULAK FRANCOIS LACHAUD XIAOJIN WU LEE GLAZER FABIAN DRIXLER ROBERT GOREE

The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi

Focal Point’s brief is to locate non-profit photo institutions with unique programs and vision. For our second installment, our curiosity led us to the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi and to an interview with its curator for the past five years, Rahaab Allana. The accomplished Allana, a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in London, member of the governing board of the Alliance Francaise in Delhi, author of Inherited Spaces, Inhabited Places (a volume on World Heritage Sites/2005), a guest editor of the Indian art magazine Marg (Volume 61: Aperture and Identity—Early Photography in India) and editor of India’s first Photography Quarterly, PIX (its second issue, Outsider, to be released in May 2011) is also a photographer in his own right.

Recording South Indian Architecture: Linnaeus Tripe and Edmund David Lyon

When the invention of photography was publicly announced in 1839, the new medium was soon perceived as an essential tool for surveying new territories. From the early 1850s the Government of India made official the recording of architecture and antiquities and sponsored several photographic expeditions. This article presents the development of official photography in India from its inception in the mid-1850s to the late 1860s, focusing primarily on the work of two important practitioners, Linnaeus Tripe and Edmund David Lyon, who were both employed by the Government of Madras. Separated by ten years, Tripe and Lyon travelled throughout South India during their employment with the Madras Presidency and frequently recorded the same sites. A comparison of their work reveals the changes that arose in the concept of delineating architecture and antiquities between the 1850s and the 1860s and the alterations which the recorded monuments underwent in that time, as well as enabling the compositional styles adopted by both practitioners to be studied for the first time.

Summaries of Scholarly Symposia 1.1

The Trans-Asia Photography Review is pleased to publish summaries and reviews of symposia, conferences, panels and workshops on topics related to photography in Asia. In addition to the symposia summarized here, summaries of the symposia on 19th Century photography in India held at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts can be found via their website at www.acparchives.com and abstracts from the Facing Asia conference (National Gallery of Australia, August 2010) can be downloaded at http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/facing-asia. Please send information on other meetings that could be summarized to the Editor at asianphotography@hampshire.edu. This issue features three symposia: The Role of Photography in Shaping China's Image, 1860-1945 (Northwestern University, April 24-25, 2009) China Seen by the Chinese: Documentary Photography, 1951-2003 (Princeton University, October 24, 2009) Photographic Practices, Visual Transgression, and National Identity in Meiji Japan and Early Republican China (Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Chicago, March 2009)

Rosalind C. Morris. Review of "The Coming of Photography in India" by Christopher Pinney.

Rosalind C. Morris. Review of "The Coming of Photography in India" by Christopher Pinney.

Visualisierungen in der deutschen Geographie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Beispiele Robert Schlagintweit und Hans Meyer

Visualization in 19th-century German geography: Robert Schlagintweit and Hans Meyer as examples. – Visual representations of nature formed an essential part of 19th-century earth sciences. In particular, colonial photography – as a visual source, and as an instrument of the construction of national identities – serves essential research interests of current history and social sciences. The present paper is a case study on the role and function of photography in German geography of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It focuses on the work of the Munich geographer Robert Schlagintweit (1833–1885) and the Leipzig colonial geographer Hans Meyer (1858–1929); the early history of photography in India and the function of images in the geographical exploration of overseas territories are discussed. Although there is nearly half a century between the work of R. Schlagintweit and H. Meyer, their photography shows remarkable parallels. The ideas of both on the practice of visualization are rooted in pedagogic and didactic concepts as well as in popular science. For both geographers photography was essentially a technical help, which often needed graphic revisions. And they both preferred photography to depict people and buildings (compared, for instance, to landscapes). Concerning the more comprehensive question of how far their photography transmitted a specific German ‘image of abroad’, it is indicated that such a specific image should have its essential roots in a peculiar visual culture of German earth sciences in the first half of the 19th century. Thus the paper offers a starting point for further studies discussing the change from a ‘Biedermeier image’ of foreign cultures to a more ‘colonial’ one in 19th-century German geography.

Uncovering India: Studies of nineteenth-century Indian photography

Over the past three years, academic interest in nineteenth-century photography from India has been growing at a rapid pace. Seven significant books, as well as numerous important articles, have been produced during this period. Of the seven volumes, three have been general surveys of the topic, each book presenting a broad history of photography in India and each book marking an important exhibition. These titles include: India through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911 (2000), India: Pioneering Photographers 1850-1900 (2001) and Reverie and Reality: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of India from the Ehrenfeld Collection (2003). Of the other four publications, Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation (2003), is the only one to employ a thematic approach and examines the photographic representation of Indian architecture. The remaining volumes address the work of individual practitioners such as the Greek photographer Felice Beato1 in Beato's Delhi 1857, 1997 (2000), the work of the British photographerSamuel Bourne in Samuel Bourne, Sieben Jahre Indien: Photographien und Reiseberichte 1863-1870 (2001) and the partnership of Baker and Burke in From Kashmir to Kabul, The Photographs of John Burke and William Baker 1860-1900 (2002).

India: through the lens; photography, 1840-1911

Divided into thematic sections, this volume takes a look at individual genres of photography in India. These include city panoramas, documentary records of architectural monuments and native peoples of India, images of war, landscapes, portraits of the Maharajas, images of the British empire and native Indian photographers, focusing in particular on the remarkable Lala Deen Dayal. While the approach intertwines roles of photography and colonialism, the deciding factor in the choice of images is aesthetic quality.

Representations of India: Normalisation and the ‘Other’

Representations of India: Normalisation and the ‘Other’

Photography and the Elphinstone Institution of Bombay

Abstract Ralizing the potentials of photography, the Court of Directors of the East India company recommended to the Government of Bombay as early as 1845 ‘the encouragement of the study of this useful art of photography in any of the seientific or educational institutions under the control or inf1uence of your government’. They also offered to furnish students with the requisite apparatus, if they found it necessary to procure them from England1. The proposal was repeated in their dispatch dated 29th December 1854, when they again expressed their desire to establish training in photography. Thereupon, W. Hart, Secretary to the Government of Bombay, requested the Board of Education of Bombay Presidency to submit a scheme for carrying out this project2. Mr Stowell, Secretary to the Board of Education, called for the opinions of the Principal of the Elphinstone Institution, and of its Professor of Chemistry3. A small but interesting episode of early photography in India had its beginning in this way.

The Rajas and Taaluqdars of Oudh

Abstract Darogah Haji Abbas Ali1 R. DESMOND, Photography in India during the nineteenth century, India Office Library and Records Report (1974), p.31. , a municipal engineer, was responsible for The Lucknow Album 2 The Lucknow Album, Baptist Mission Press; Amir-ud-daulla Library and Records, Lucknow (1874). (1874), consisting of a map of Lucknow and photographic illustrations of the town, with detailed descriptions of the various places of interest. It was intended as a guide to the town. The book contains 50 photographs, but we are not sure whether these were taken by the author himself.

The First Four Decades of Photography in India

Abstract Within a few years of its discovery, photography reached the shores of far-away India, which was then both commercially and politically a land of great potentialities. Between service forays, officers or the British army in India had nothing much to do in their posts and were free to indulge in hobbies of their choice British civilians too, loved the adventure arid opportunities that offered themselves in an exotic land. They flitted from post to post, changing professions often and enjoying a life of ease and indolence. The well-to-do among the Indians were either currying favour with the white man or else busy plotting for his ouster. Many had ample wealthl to indulge in new-fangled ideas and photography held for them an attraction beyond compare, because it depended upon God's bounteous sunlight in the country, and combined it with dark abracadabral domgs in the dark room.

19th century indian photographers in India

Abstract It may never be possible to discover who was the first person to use a camera in India. Dr A. Toussaint considers it likely that the Frenchman, Jules Léger, may have taken photographs during his visit to India before establishing a photographic studio in Mauritius in February 18451. Josiah Rowe, a Calcutta surveyor, was hailed as ‘the father of photography in India’ by Dr F. J. Mouat, the first president of the Bengal Photographic Society, but as yet no photographs have been found that can be attributed to him. The earliest known photographs were taken by John McCosh, a surgeon in the Bengal establishment of the East India Company's army, during the second Sikh War in 1848-49. He had no doubts about the pleasures of photography: I would strongly recommend every assistant-surgeon to make himself master of photography in all its branches, on paper, on plate glass, and on metallic plate. I have practised it for many years, and know of no extra-professional pursuit that will repay him for all the expense and trouble (and both are very considerable) than this fascinating study2.

Tropical Forestry and Wild Life

On 17th July, 1951, the Society had the great pleasure of hearing a talk by Mr. F. W. Champion upon the relation, in tropical forests, between scientific forestry and wild life preservation. Mr. Champion during his twenty-five years as a forest officer in India, became famous for his knowledge of the jungle animals. He was a pioneer of wild life photography in India and his books The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow and With Camera in Tiger Land will be well known to members of our Society. After leaving India in 1947 Mr. Champion took up a post in the forest service of Tanganyika Territory, where he is still serving.