Photography

“The photographer will point his camera at each pinnacled niche or floriated doorway, he will take his sun painted sketch of each figured corbel or grotesque gargoyle; and in fact carry away in his portfolio every nice architectural detail long before time with his destructive hands shall have the opportunity to mar any more of the beauty of the original.” Introduction S… >

Early Efforts It is in these years that we find some of the earliest efforts of systematic photographing of excavations, one example being the photographs taken by Augustus le Plongeon and his wife, Alice, during their excavations in the Yucatan (Mexico) between 1873 and 1885. The excavators, who were also antiquarians and mystics, had hoped to attain fame and fortune by pu… >

Social Saliency The impulse to look beyond the ‘appearance’ of photographs has had very little hold within the archaeological imagination. Given that to ‘see is to believe’ still resonates on knowledge formation on the archaeological, it is equally striking to note how minimal any critical engagement with this relationship has been. Methods of pursuing archaeological phot… >

British Scholarship The British pursuit of knowledge on India followed the East India Company’s rise in status from a trading company to the revenue collector of Bengal in 1765. The translations into English of the indigenous Persian and Sanskrit texts, which were a direct response to the Company’s new administrative needs, facilitated the recovery of ‘Ancient’ India. This … >

Historical Scholarship Of the archaeological work that was undertaken during much of the nineteenth century, one was a survey of the ‘Hindu’ and ‘Mohammedan’ monuments, an activity pioneered as a scholarly pursuit by James Fergusson, who ventured out of his lucrative indigo plantation at a rather opportune moment (when indigo prices fell partly as a consequence of the depr… >

Documents Records When Cunningham got himself appointed by the then Viceroy, Lord Canning, to head the newly established Archaeological Survey, the Raj had been planted on the Indian soil, and so had some of the seminal institutions, such as the geographical and revenue surveys through which the British had begun to map, classify and store information on India. In their gra… >

Visual Evidence Fergusson’s aim of creating visual documents that could transcribe his vision was not novel, as the painters, William and Thomas Daniells, had harboured similar objectives before him. But the distinction he made between his sketches and theirs is instructive to note. For, it has a resonance on what was subsequently, i.e. during the twentieth century, promote… >

Collection Archives Although, the photographic documentation of India’s architectural topography had conclusively begun by the mid 1850's, it was pursued as a government-directed policy only after the formal establishment of the British Empire of India, and with it the British anxieties of retaining it. From the 1880's concerned efforts were made to make the ‘listing’ more… >

Archive Field Study Encyclopedic repositories of photographs and drawings have proved to be one of the most enduring creations of colonial politics. Such repositories, like the one which at present resides within the British Library, facilitated precisely the opposite of what we may think nineteenth century archaeological investigations were about. By bringing sites to scho… >