India In Camera: Tracing Early Indian Photographic Studio Practices

DAG’s exhibition, Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855–1920, draws attention to the photographic studio as a decisive site in the visual history of colonial India.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, studios across the Indian subcontinent, ranging across varying uses from commercial, missionary, and government-affiliated, played a central role in shaping how Indian people were seen, classified, and remembered. The photographs on view at the show are not simply images of ‘types’; they are products of studio practices that mediated between colonial knowledge, aesthetic convention, and commercial demand, making them ‘objects on the move; performative, mutable and recodable’.

Nicholas & Co. Todas in the Nilgiri Hills, 1860s, Silver albumen print, 9.3 x 11.3 in. Collection: DAG

Photography entered India at a moment when the British administration sought to catalogue its territories and populations. As essays in the volume accompanying the show, edited by historian Sudeshna Guha, make clear, the camera quickly became an instrument of anthropology and governance. Yet the authority often attributed to the ‘colonial gaze’ obscures the material conditions under which these images were made. Photographic studios—and not just abstract systems of power—were often the place where classification took visual form.

Studios provided the technical expertise, controlled environments, and reproducible formats that made large-scale ethnographic projects possible. Backdrops, props, lighting, and pose were carefully arranged to render bodies legible as caste, tribe, occupation, or race. These choices, while presented as neutral or scientific, drew heavily on the conventions of portraiture and on the commercial logic of producing images that were clear, recognisable, and marketable. The studio thus functioned as a space where art, commerce, and science converged.

At the same time, studios were not monolithic extensions of the colonial state. Many were independent commercial enterprises, including Indian-owned firms, responding to a wide clientele: administrators, missionaries, scholars, tourists, and local elites. Images commissioned for surveys and exhibitions circulated beyond their original purpose—as album pages, postcards, cabinet cards, or loose prints—entering domestic collections and popular visual culture. Through this circulation, photographs acquired new meanings and uses, often far removed from the classificatory intent that shaped their production.

A recurring theme in the exhibition is repetition. The same images, or near-identical compositions, appear across different contexts and decades. This repetition was enabled by studio technologies, such as the negative, the printing process, and the archive; but it did not result in fixed or stable meanings. As historian of photography, Christopher Pinney observes, photographs are not static records but mutable objects, continually reactivated by new settings, captions, and viewers. The studio archive reveals how difficult it was to sustain the illusion of stable ‘types’: repetition always produced difference.

The exhibition also foregrounds the tension between portrait and type. Many images hover ambiguously between individual likeness and ethnographic specimen. Faces look back at the camera with presence and personality, even as captions attempt to subsume them under generic labels. This tension exposes a fundamental contradiction within ethnographic photography: the desire to abstract human beings into categories, especially in a colonial context where the colonisers often failed to recognise the vast internal differences within the population, and the camera’s simultaneous capacity to register irreducible individuality.

Omar Khan draws our attention to the subject of the numerous nautch girl postcards that were produced by this visual economy, which further demonstrated how studios transformed ethnographic subjects into performative and eroticised types. Studios staged bodies, gestures, and costumes for maximum circulation, especially in postcard form, revealing how photographic studios were instrumental in popularising and sexualising certain identities far beyond their original contexts. Here, the studio’s role was not merely representational but productive: it generated new publics and new meanings, showing how ethnographic photography slipped into popular visual culture.

Charles Shepherd, Group of Afredees from the Khyber Pass, Peshawur, c. 1862, Silver albumen print from wet collodion glass negative, 8.2 x 11.4 in. Collection: DAG

Finally, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the agency of those photographed and those who made the photographs. Resistance, negotiation, and performance shaped many photographic encounters. Studios were sites of persuasion as much as control, where sitters posed, refused, delayed, or staged themselves for the camera. The resulting images bear traces of these encounters, reminding us that photography was an event, not merely an outcome; and that they could be seen as ‘a memento of the circumstances under which it was taken’, as Pinney puts it.

By focusing on the studio: its practices, constraints, and circulations, one can shift attention away from photography as transparent evidence and towards photography as a material and social process, located within pre-existing cultural complexes across the vast geography of the Indian subcontinent. The images here do not simply document India’s people; they reveal how identities were made visible, contested, and unsettled through the apparatus of the camera. In doing so, they prompt us to reflect on how systems of classification continue to shape the ways we see, archive, and display human difference today.

Clifton and Co. (Studio), Carved windows, Ahmedabad, c. 1900s, Collotype pasted on card 7.2 x 9.5 in. Collection: DAG

Some of the major photography studios explored in the show include:

Messrs. Merwanjee Bomonjee & Co.

One of the earliest Indian-owned photographic firms in Bombay. The studio proposed publishing The Indian Amateur’s Photographic Album in the 1850s, illustrating the early participation of native photographers in commercial and ethnographic image production.

Shepherd and Robertson

A major commercial studio active across North India and the frontier regions. The firm played a significant role in producing ethnographic photographs later incorporated into The People of India volumes, which was an ambitious photographic and ethnographic project published between 1868 and 1875 under the editorship of John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye.

Bourne and Shepherd

Formed after Samuel Bourne joined Charles Shepherd, this studio became one of the most influential photographic firms in colonial India, producing landscapes, portraits, and ethnographic images widely circulated in albums and publications.

Nicholas and Co.

A Madras-based commercial studio credited with producing ethnographic portraits, including images reproduced in anthropological publications such as William Marshall’s work on the Nilgiri tribes.

Abbas Ali Studio

The studio of Abbas Ali (Daroga Abbas Ali), active in Lucknow. It produced The Beauties of Lucknow and the Lucknow Album (1874), representing one of the most important examples of Indian-authored studio photography engaging with and subtly reworking ethnographic classifications.