Typecasting

This exhibition showcases the ability of photography to challenge typologies. The photographs we see here reveal how unstable social categories can be despite photography often being used to support them.

The emergence of photography in the 1850s coincided with the beginnings of modern anthropology. The camera swiftly became the primary instrument for ethnographic investigations, and diverse communities of the Indian subcontinent were thus ‘captured’ for analysis and classification. Looking back, it is obvious that this documentation was problematic on various levels: photography had its own aesthetic conventions and was not the objective instrument that some people claimed it to be. And the nineteenth-century project to typify people into races, tribes, occupations and castes groups was a colonial enterprise driven by British perceptions and purposes. This exhibition brings critical scrutiny to the histories and errors of typecasting, and makes available the historical photographs for new interpretations by new audiences.

Over the last decade, DAG has been collecting early ethnographic photographs of India (along with other genres) and now possesses one of the largest collections in the country. The exhibition showcases a range of photographic material: prints, cabinet cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, folios and albums; and also published books. It maps the diversity of people across a vast geography: from the northeastern Lepcha and Bhutia tribes to the Afridis in the northwest, and the Toda and Vedda in the south; and from talukdars and rich Parsee communities to dancing girls, coolies, barbers and snake charmers. It shows how the early ethnographic photography of India has defined our social and economic groups, but also highlights the propensity of a photograph to constantly accrue new meanings and identities. It points to the possibilities of the transcultural encounters that photography facilitates.