Histories in the Making

This exhibition draws on the rich collection of early photographs of Indian monuments in the DAG archives to foreground photography’s powerful role in shaping our understanding of India’s history. It shows how photography helped to build the field sciences, by creating networks of information flow, and draws attention to the interconnected histories of politics, fieldwork, and the framing of academic disciplines, especially archaeology.

Contrary to assumptions about a stable relationship between a photograph and the objects it shows, photographs are complex visual material. Their meanings shift through changes in techniques, and through evolving practices of collecting, archiving, circulation and consumption. The narratives of photographing India presented here alert us to the overlapping domains of colonialism, science and scholarship.

The photographs taken during the 1850s and 1860s represent the heady experimental years when a new technology was deployed in a terrain being surveyed for the first time. British India was the first country outside Europe to have professional photographic studios, and many early photographers of India were deemed outstanding by their contemporaries elsewhere. They followed and transformed pictorial conventions, emphasised contemporary tastes, introduced new artistic traditions and moulded the visual sensibilities of their varied audiences, from scholars to tourists. They show histories in the making. While many of the works by leading British photographers of the time reveal a now well recognised colonial gaze, those by their Indian contemporaries point to previously little noticed interactions with that narrative.

Selected by guest curator Dr Sudeshna Guha, the material on display represents the many different objects that were created through photographic technology, such as paper and glass negatives; collotype, albumen, and sliver gelatin prints; lavish albums that were gifted and collected as souvenirs; lithographs; stereographs; cartes-de-visite, and cabinet cards. In covering a chronological span stretching up to the first two decades of the twentieth century, the exhibition also showcases the earliest postcards of Indian monuments. They bring us to see the endowments of histories to places and things through stock images, and reflect, thereby, upon the notion and value of seeing and knowing.