PHOTOGRAPHY IN VICTORIAN INDIA Author(s): RAY DESMOND Source: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 134, No. 5353 (DECEMBER 1985), pp. 48- 61 Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41374078 Accessed: 11-09-2016 11:23 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Society of Arts This content downloaded from 193.50.135.4 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 11:23:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms PHOTOGRAPHY IN VICTORIAN INDIA I The Sir George Birdwood by by Memorial Lecture I I RAY DESMOND | India Office Library and Records , delivered to the Society on Tuesday 14th May 1985, with Giles Eyre , of Eyre and Hobhouse, in the Chair THE chairman: As a picture dealer I early interest to me. Ray's second book was Victorian India recognized that photography had to an astonishing in Focus , which introduced me to W. W. Hooper, a degree affected the other visual arts since 1850. 1 also brilliant military amateur whose photography nearly recognized in Ray Desmond a fellow spirit who had finished his career when he was reprimanded in almost tumbled into photography. I say 'almost' Parliament and by the Viceroy for excessive realism. because twelve years at Kew were not spent without He had set up his camera to get photographs of certain access to Fox Talbot's botanical specimens and other Burmese convicts at the precise moment that they natural history photographs. The push came when were struck by the bullets that were to execute them, I Ray transferred to the India Office Library and think in 1886. His third book, with an introduction by Records, becoming Deputy Librarian and Deputy Paul Theroux, was Railways of the Raj. Of all the Keeper. He will tell us how many photographs he British legacies it seems to me that they significantly found in what must be the largest and most varied col- remain, huffing and puffing all over the subcontinent. lection of Indian photographs in the world. 'Un- Curiously, I find that the train from Kalka is still the disturbed', I think, is how he would have described it best way to get to Simla. In Pakistan, nearly forty at the time; but perhaps 'unexplored' would be a more years on, the rules for passengers timelessly include diplomatic term. What he also discovered, despite his headings like 'Awakening passengers at night', devotion to books and records, was that certain photo- 'Ladies travelling alone' and 'Servants in sole charge graphs are capable of communication with an im- of children'. They are deliciously dated. But for me mediacy and impact such as cannot be imparted by the the most evocative photograph in that book was of the written word. fortified railway station at Lahore, built shortly after Ray Desmond's first book, written with Pat Barr, the Mutiny, which was so complicated in its defensive was Simla , A Hill Station in British India. I suppose I layout that as ADC to the then Governor of the Pun- had been waiting for it without knowing ever since I jab I once failed to meet the Chief Justice on time, an had lived in Simla at Barnes Court when I was an enormity which very nearly finished my career. ADC in the final years of the Raj. Apart from the Ray Desmond, I am glad to say, has a career which is photographs in that book there were lithographs, by no means finished. He is presently returning to Kew sketches and watercolours, all of intense and nostalgic and to work for the Linnean Society. Both are lucky. The following lecture , which was illustrated, was then delivered. 48 This content downloaded from 193.50.135.4 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 11:23:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms DECEMBER 1985 PHOTOGRAPHY IN VICTORIAN INDIA education. It comes as no surprise, therefore, marked the very beginning of photography that at a meeting held in Calcutta on 2nd October IT marked in in COULD India. India. the It wasIt be verywas said a beginninga box box thatof of the variable variable of camera photography size sizewith obscura with a a 1839 he 'gave some details of photographic draw- lens which produced an image of what appeared ing, by means of the sun's light, of which the in front of it on an inclined mirror which in turn principle wholly differs from that of Europe . reflected it on to thin paper placed on the base or Professor O'Shaughnessy uses, it seems, a solu- glass top of the box. The outlines of the image tion of gold, and produces many various tints, could be traced on the paper and used as the basis from a light rose colour through purple down to for a more finished drawing. The topographical deep black, and, what is more extraordinary, a artists, Thomas and William Danieli, working green'. This intriguing but tantalizingly brief in India in the late eighteenth century could not account comes from the Asiatic Journal for have achieved their high output without its aid. January/April 1840. Was O'Shaughnessy's The camera obscura was also used by W. H. Fox work a variation of Fox Talbot's photogenic Talbot, who experimented with light-sensitive drawings? paper in the 1830s in an attempt to preserve its Modern photography, that is the production fugitive image. of a negative from which multiple positives can About the same time the Frenchman, Louis be made, evolved from Fox Talbot's experi- Daguerre, succeeded in recording a picture on ments. He exposed sensitized paper in a camera, silvered copper plates sensitized with iodine and treated it with gallo-nitrate of silver, then washed bromine. Every daguerreotype, as it was called, and fixed it with hypo. The negative was brought was unique; it was not possible to make multiple into contact with paper that had been soaked in a copies. The exposure time could range from salt solution and subsequently coated with several minutes to as much as half an hour. ammonia and silver nitrate. Exposure to light Daguerre's invention, patented in 1839, was transferred the image on the negative to the salt the subject of three long articles in the Bombay paper, which was then fixed with hypo and Times in December 1839. There is reason to washed. Fox Talbot patented his invention in believe that at least one daguerreotype camera 1841, calling it 'Calotype' from the Greek root was in use in Calcutta as early as 1840. In 1844 meaning a beautiful. It was also known as Talbo- Monsieur F. M. Montairo, announced to the type. citizens of Calcutta that he was 'prepared to take Towards the close of 1848 a Mr F. Schanzhofer likenesses by the Daguerreotype process'. started In a business in Calcutta as a calotype 1868 when daguerreotypes had been superseded photographer. Calotype cameras were soon in Europe by the calotype and collodion processes, widely used in India by both professional and F. W. Baker of Calcutta was still being listed amateur by photographers, who did not need to be Thacker's Post Office Directory as a 'Daguerreo- reminded by the Journal of the Photographic typisť. Most of the surviving daguerreotypes Society in London that 'Indian photographers are portraits, but occasionally, as happened would a do well to turn more of their attention to few years ago, the rare landscape appears in the the calotype process which is so simple and cer- sale rooms. The delicate hand-tinting on some tain in its effects'.1 daguerreotypes was sometimes the work of minia- The long time-exposure was one of the dis- ture painters whose traditional livelihood advantages had of the calotype process - it could been lost with the advent of photography. range This between three and seven minutes for land- hand-tinting was usually achieved by applying scapes. Jesse Mitchell, Adjutant of the 1st Native coloured powder with a fine brush and fixing Veteran it Battalion, 'took a good negative of the to the plate with gum arabic. Catholic Cathedral in nine minutes, between 3 William O'Shaughnessy, who joined the Eastand 4 pm; the paper having been excited about India Company as an assistant surgeon in 1833, half an hour previous to exposure in the camera . was unquestionably a polymath. Not only There was were some deep shadows, the detail in he the founder of the telegraph service in Indiawhich is fairly rendered: the Cassarina trees also but during his thirty years in that country would he have been tolerably well represented, had it wrote on subjects as diverse as batteries, electric not blown very hard at the time.'2 Until the col- motors, lightning rods, chemistry, physics, lodion process became available instantaneous pharmacology, botany, philology and medical photography was not always successful. 49 This content downloaded from 193.50.135.4 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 11:23:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS PROCEEDINGS Fever hospital under construction at Calcutta.