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By Brij Bhushan Sharma | |||
Bremner has actually rendered a service to historians of photography. In 1940, at the age of 77, he privately issued a little book [2] setting out his 'reverie' [3] of his forty years (1883-1923) in India. It is a minor goldmine, complete with twenty-one autotype reproductions of his works. [4] The value of My Forty Years in India lies in the fact that it shows under what conditions provincial British photographers worked in India. | |||
| Bremner was born in 1863 in the village of Aberchinder, also known as 'Foggylone'. He was one of several children of a poor photographer in Banff, Scotland, and left school at the age of thirteen to join his father's studio. |
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| He worked there for six years. In 1882 his brother-in-law G.W. Lawrie, a photographer of some repute with a studio in Lucknow in north India [Map], [5] offered him a job, and Bremner left for India on P. & O. Sutlej, with £20 borrowed from his father, and passage provided by Lawrie. Arriving in Bombay, he travelled 'two days and two nights' to reach Lucknow, where he joined his sister and her husband, who were living in a house named 'The Mosque', so called because an Indian of some importance had ben buried there once upon a time and the mosque erected to his memory' (p. 11). On arrival in Lucknow, Bremner found 'studio accessories were very limited. Just a carpet to cover part of the ground, a plain cloth background, stretched on a frame, and a chair or two, not forgetting the all important camera and lens adjusted on a folding tripod. In a corner was a small square tent sufficiently large to do the changing and developing of plates. Mr. Lawrie was somewhat behind the times, due, no doubt, to being in India. He had not got away from the practice of coating with collodion a plate in the dark room and immersing in a bath of nitrate of silver to produce the sensitive element. A long exposure was required, and to prevent the movement of the sitter a headrest had to be adjusted. I persuaded Mr. Lawrie to give it up and obtain from home a supply of dry plates. He did so and, of course, was delighted with the change, which enabled him to obtain more natural results instead of having the sitter's head placed against a peice of metal to precent movement, the exposure being thus reduced to a minimum' (pp. 12-13). To start with, Bremner was sent by Lawrie to Cawnpore (now Kanpur), not far from Lucknow. The next move was to Allahabad, again not very far. According to Bremner: 'I was sent to Allahabad to do business with a British Regiment. To enable me to pitch my tent I had to obtain permissions from the commanding officer and also to get payments of accounts for photographs through the Pay Sergeant of Companies. This was a satisfactorily arranged and I was given one of the unoccupied barrack rooms to live in, and just outside was the studio tent where soldiers came and went bringing with them their vouchers for a supply of photographs, carte-de-visite or cabinet size as the case may be. This system entailed not a single bad debt and a certain commission was allowed to the Pay Sergeants for their trouble' (p. 14). Then came the transfer to Ferozepur in the Punjab. Bremner took the train to Ludhiana, 'The railway terminus in those days, and from there, I had to engage what is known as a Dak Gharry, a fairly heavy vehicle drawn by two horses with relays every five miles, galloping all the way . . . The distance [from Ludhiana] . . . was 80 miles' (pp.14-15). Ferozepur was the site of a large cantonment. Recalled Bremner: -The bulk of the business was done with a British regiment which was known as the 60th Rifles. I was accomodated in the barracks and one of the Company cooks supplied me with meals, not all to appetising . . . I found myself quite busy, all the work having to be done on the spot, from operating to finishing the mounted photograph . . .' (p. 15). > |
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| Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, PO Box 25, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 3UE from History of Photography 13/4, Fall 1989 | |||
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