Photographs of India and South Asia, 1850-1940, undated

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Summary

Title:

Photographs of India and South Asia

Dates:

1850-1940, undated

Creators:

Jacobson, Ken and Bourne & Shepherd

Abstract:

Photographs of India and South Asia comprises over 4,500 nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographs documenting the people, social customs, religious practices, architecture, and landscapes of the region, as well as the colonial presence on the subcontinent. The work of approximately 235 identified photographers, along with a significant number of photographs by unidentified makers, is represented in the collection. While most of the identified photographers are British, photographs taken by French, German, Italian, Zanzibari, Chinese, and American photographers are also present. The collection also contains examples of the work of more than sixty native Indian photographers.

Extent:

143.45 Linear Feet (approximately 4,625 photographs in 108 boxes and 3 flatfiles)

Language:

The collection is in English with some French and Hindi.

Preferred citation:

Photographs of India and South Asia, 1850-1940, undated, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2022.R.23.

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/archives2022r23

Background

Scope and content:

The collection of over 4,500 nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographs of India and South Asia documents the people, social customs, religious practices, architecture, and landscapes of the region, as well as the colonial presence on the subcontinent. In addition to images recording local and colonial life and the intersection of the two cultures, the collection also contains many photographs related to the subcontinent's intertwined military and state histories, including images related to the First War of Independence / Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Delhi or imperial Durbars of 1877, 1903, and 1911. Numerous views depicting the varied geography of the subcontinent, from the snowy peaks of the Himalayas to the tropical climes of the southern Indian states are present in the collection. Additionally, over 450 images document Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Islamic, and Mughal monuments ranging from second-century BCE Hindu and Buddhist cave sites and temples to monuments built towards the end of the Mughal empire during British colonial rule, while other views capture the changing urban landscapes of the region.

The work of approximately 235 identified photographers, along with a significant number of photographs by unidentified makers, is represented in the collection. While most of the identified photographers are British, photographs taken by French, German, Italian, Zanzibari, Chinese, and American photographers are also present. The collection also contains examples of the work of more than sixty native Indian photographers.

The Jacobsons compiled the collection over a period of fifty years beginning in 1970. While the Jacobsons sought out photographs across the European continent, the majority of the photographs in the collection were acquired in England, relics of the British in India that had made their way home with British travelers and military and administrative personnel. Created during the European domination of the subcontinent, the photographs in the collection embody what Christopher Pinney has called the region's "collision with colonialism" (Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs). With few exceptions, the photographs in the collection fall within the period known as the British Raj (1857-1947) when the Indian subcontinent and adjacent regions were ruled by the British Crown.

As was true for most nineteenth-century colonial territories, the new technology of photography with its promises of "authenticity" and "accuracy" quickly took hold on the subcontinent, rapidly overshadowing the established forms of visuality that had previously helped European nations to reinforce control over vast and variable foreign territories. The collection mirrors the history of the medium of photography as it was practiced in the colonies and includes examples of the full range of photographic formats produced during the Raj: daguerreotype, ambrotype, salted paper print, calotype negative, albumen print, gelatin silver print, carbon print, platinum print, glass transparency, collodion printing-out paper, Woodburytype, collotype, photogravure, halftone, and photochrome. While the bulk of the images are present as loose prints, the collection also contains eighteen photograph albums and a full range of card formats — cartes-de-visite, cabinet cards, stereographs, and postcards.

For the most part, the photographs in the collection were taken through a colonial lens, or rather a series of lenses, that captured the homogenizing perspectives officially embodied in the colonial administration and the apparatus of the colonial state, as well as the agendas of scientific inquiry that ranged from the documentation and classification of castes and tribes to archaeology and the recording of religious sites and monuments. The perspectives present in the work of the early professional, i.e. state-sponsored photographers, are also evident in the images of amateurs who sought to make sense of their new quotidian lives in strange places far from home. As life under the British Raj became increasingly consolidated in the second half of the nineteenth century, independent professional photographers were able to establish successful studios that catered to local colonials and visiting tourists, and to armchair tourists around the world. Many of the Indian-run studios also adopted the colonial aesthetic forms that appealed to colonial and local patrons alike. Yet, on the other hand, local photographers were also able to gain access to subjects often difficult for foreigners to capture.

The vast majority of the collection—over 3,700 photographs of India—are found in Series I. "India," as it relates to the collection, is defined as the land mass of the Indian subcontinent proper, comprising the current countries of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, including the North-West Frontier (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and the kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. Also included in this series are a small number of photographs from the adjacent areas of Afghanistan and the French colony of Pondicherry (Union Territory of Puducherry). Images of sites that fall within present-day Pakistan are included in this series, as the region was then part of pre-Partiton India. The photographs in the series fall within the period of the British Raj, spanning from the final years of the East India Company's hold on the subcontinent through the first decades of the twentieth century. Photographers represented range from those working in a government capacity, either in military or civil service, to traveling and independent photographers to large, well-known studios established by colonial photographer-entrepreneurs and to native Indian photographers.

Series II contains close to 200 photographs of the Indian Province of Burma (Myanmar) taken between 1860 and 1910. The series includes the work of photographers who established studios in the province including J. Jackson, Philipp Adolphe Klier, and Felice Beato, who lived and worked in Burma from the late 1880s until around 1910 after leaving Japan, as well as those who visited the region such as Colin Roderick Murray (working for Bourne & Shepherd) and Ian Malcolm who accompanied Lord Curzon on his tour through Burma in late 1901.

Series III comprises approximately 515 photographs of the island nation of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) taken while it was a British Crown Colony. The major photography studios active in nineteenth-century Ceylon, including A. W. A. Plâté & Co., W. L. H. Skeen & Co., Scowen & Co., and Colombo Apothecaries, are all amply represented in the series. Also present here are a group of photographs taken by the German scientist-explorer-photographer Robert von Schlangenweit who explored the East India Company's extensive territories in the 1850s.

Biographical / historical:

Ken and Jenny Jacobson are photographic art dealers and collectors based in England. Ken Jacobson was born in the United States and holds a BA in chemistry from Princeton University and a PhD in biophysics from King's College, London, where he met Jenny, who was working there in biochemistry research. While pursuing his doctorate, Ken Jacobson began collecting nineteenth-century photography. This avocation became a vocation, as what was to have been a gap year devoted to selling photographs before starting a career in scientific research never ended.

As his research interests shifted away from biochemistry to photography, Ken Jacobson began writing about various nineteenth-century photographers, with Jenny Jacobson acting as his advisor and editor. His books include Étude d'après nature: 19th Century Photographs in Relation to Art, with Anthony Hamber (1996); The Lovely Sea-view— which All London is Now Wondering At: A Study of the Marine Photographs Published by Gustave Le Gray, 1856-1858 (2001); Odalisques & Arabesques: Orientalist Photography, 1839-1925 (2007); and with Jenny Jacobson, Carrying Off the Palaces: John Ruskin's Lost Daguerreotypes (2015). This publication is the culmination of the Jacobson's discovery in 2006 at a small country auction in Cumbria, England, of 188 daguerreotypes of Italy, France, and Switzerland. The Jacobsons proved that these daguerreotypes, which include the largest extant group of daguerreotypes of Venice, as well as what are likely the earliest photographs made of the Alps, once belonged to the English art critic John Ruskin and that he commissioned or made themn between 1849 and 1855, when he was writing The Stones of Venice.

In addition to writing, Ken Jacobson has delivered lectures at such institutions as the Royal Asiatic Society, London; the Snite Museum, University of Notre Dame, Indiana; the Department of Art History, University of Cambridge; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and at the annual meetings of the Daguerreian Society.

The Jacobsons are members of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers. Ken Jacobson served as one of the association's board members for ten years.

Sources consulted:

Behdad, Ali, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East, Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Jacobson, Ken, Odalisques & Arabesques: Orientalist Photography, 1839-1925, London: Quaritch, 2007.

Jacobson, Ken and Jenny Jacobson, Carrying off the Palaces: John Ruskin's Lost Daguerreotypes, London: Quaritch, 2015.

____. "About Us," K. & J. Jacobson. 19th Century Photography, http://www.jacobsonphoto.com.

Terpak, Frances. "Acquisition Approval Form for 'Collection of Indian and South Asian Photographs (4,625 items), 1850s-1930s.'" accession no. 2022.R.23, October 11, 2021.

Acquisition information:

Acquired in 2022.

Processing information:

The collection was processed by Quin Fraley in 2023-2024 under the supervision of Beth Ann Guynn. Guynn and Fraley cataloged the collection in 2023-2024, and Guynn wrote the finding aid in 2024.

The titles of the individual photographs in the collection reflect the nineteenth-century names and spellings of the sites and personal names depicted in the images as included in the original captions. Current spellings are included in the scope and content note for the individual photographs.

The numbers preceeding the titles of the individual photographs represent their component unique identifiers, derived by adding the numbers assigned to the images by the compilers of the collection to the accession number for the collection. These numbers do not appear in sequence in the finding aid.

Arrangement:

Organized in three series: Series I. India, 1850-1940, undated; Series II. Burma (Myanmar), 1860-1910; and Series III. Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 1856-1900s, undated.

Physical location:

Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the catalog record for this collection. Click here for the access policy.

Rules or conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Bibliography:

Bourne, Samuel. Photographic Journeys in the Himalayas / Samuel Bourne; Comprising the Complete Texts of His Letters to the British Journal of Photography, Originally Published between 1863 and 1870; Together with a Catalogue of his Indian Photographs and the Texts of Two Other Earlier Lectures on Photography. Edited and compiled, with an introduction by Hugh Ashley Rayner. Bath: Pagoda Tree Press, 2014.

Chaudhary, Zahid R. Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Falconer, John. "A Biographical Dictionary of 19th Century Photographers in South and South-East Asia," unpublished manuscript accessed via Alan Griffiths, Luminous Lint: Photography: History, Evolution & Analysis. https://luminous-lint.com/app/home.

Hapgood, Susan. Early Bombay Photography. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2015.

Johnson, Robert Flynn. Reverie and Reality: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of India from the Ehrenfeld Collection. 2003: San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Khan, Omar. Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj. https://www.paperjewels.org.

Lacoste, Ann and Fred Ritchin, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010.

Malcolm, Ian. Indian Pictures and Problems. London: E. Grant Richards, 1907.

Pinney, Christopher. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Rayner, Hugh. John Saché: A Photographer in British India, 1864-1882. Somerset: Pagoda Tree Press, 2012.

Taylor, Meadows. Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore photographed by the late Dr. Pigou, A.C.B. Neill and Colonel Biggs ; with an historical and descriptive memoir by Colonel Meadows Taylor and architectural notes by James Fergusson. London: John Murray, 1866.

Watson, J. Forbes and Sir John William Kaye. The People of India. Watson & Kaye. London: India Museum, 1868-1875.

Indexed terms

Subjects:: Durbars -- India -- Delhi
East Indians -- Portraits
British -- India -- Portraits
Architecture -- India
Architecture -- Burma
Architecture -- Sri Lanka
Albumen prints -- 19th century
Cartes-de-visite (card photographs) -- 19th century
Cabinet photographs -- 19th century
Group portraits -- 19th century
Photograph albums -- 19th century
Studio portraits -- 19th century
Photographs, Original
Postcards -- 19th century
Stereographs -- 19th century
Gelatin silver prints -- 19th century
Ambrotypes (photographs) -- 19th century
Platinum prints -- 19th century
Daguerreotypes -- 19th century
Names:: Baker & Burke
Bourne & Shepherd
Nicholas & Co. (Madras, India)
A.W.A. Plâté & Co
Scowen & Co
Jacobson, Jenny
Beato, Felice, 1832-1909
Hooper, Willoughby Wallace, 1837-1912
Baker, William H., ca. 1829-1880
Bourne, Samuel, 1834-1912
Shepherd, Charles, (Photographer)
Malcolm, Ian, Sir, 1868-1944
Deen Dayal, Raja, 1844-1905
Murray, Colin Roderick, 1840-1884
Klier, Philipp Adolphe, 1845-1911
Places:: India -- Description and travel
Sri Lanka -- Description and travel
Burma -- Description and travel
Pakistan -- Description and travel
Bangladesh -- Description and travel
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan) -- Description and travel
Nepal -- Description and travel
Afghanistan -- Description and travel
Bhutan -- Description and travel
Sikkim (India) -- Description and travel
Puducherry (India) -- Description and travel
Daguerreotypes -- 19th century
Ajmer (India) -- Description and travel
India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947
India -- Antiquities

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:: Beth Ann Guynn and Quin Fraley
Date Encoded:: This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2025-10-01 11:05:12 -0700 .

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