in Photography's Orientalism : new essays on colonial representation

184

185

LIN ROTHE

28. Edwards, Raw Histories, 107, following Bronwen Douglas.

JOHN TAGG

29. Edwards, Raw Histories, 109.

30. Elizabeth Edwards. following John Tagg, points out that "the meaning of photographs resides in lhe discursive practices that constitute them and that they
themselves constitute, from relations of power that constitute the conditions
of existence for these photographs to current readings of Lhc image: Edwards,

THE MUTE TESTIMONY OF THE PICTURE

British Paper Photography and India

Raw Histories. 108. A few years earlier, Christopher Pinney began his Camera

Jndica with a quote also from John Tagg. ll maintains that photography "is tie<l
to definite conditions of existence and its products are mean ingful and legible
only within the particular currencies they have. [Photography's I history has no
unity." Christopher Pinney, Camera lndica: The Social Life ofJudia11 Plwtogmplis
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 17.
31. H. H. the seventeenth Gyalwa Karmapa O rgyen Trinley Dorje is currently

In September 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened its
doors on a groundbrcaking e, hibition that sought to extend the hi! tory of what
it called "British photographs from paper negatives" beyond the limits of the

assembl ing an archive of photographs of his predecessor. the sixteenth Karma pa

conventional account. ' Presented as the first attempt "to explore the opening

Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924- 81); Lhundup Damcho, close disciple of H. H. the
seventeenth Karmapa, personal communication, 12 May 20 11.

decades of paper photography in the country of its birth;' Impressed by Uglit:

British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 also offered a foil to an
earlier, equally unprecedented survey of French daguerreotypes, bolstering the
claims of the British-or should one say English?-calotype process to be fully
a rival to its French competitor. 2
This explicit coupling of the story of the emergence and early deployment
of a new imagi ng technology to a national theme was a distin ctive featu re of
both exh ibitions, only partiall y borne out by the nationalistic rh etoric through
which the competing photographic processes were promoted at the time, in Lhe

first decade and a half of what t11e exhibitions remained conten t to describe as
"the development of the new medium of photography: 3 Leaving the question of
"the medium" to hang for the moment, it soon became apparent that the insistence of Impressed by Light o n "British photographs; "British photographers:
and "British artists" would prove equally unsustainable, since the borderline
that was drawn was deceptive and its enforcement inconsistent. It was not just
a matter of the vagaries of curatorial selection, however. Notions of national
identity notoriously turn on the orbit of difference, introducing an unwanted
element of uncertainty and deferral that, inevitably, has a corrosive effect on the
confidently universalist language of masters and monuments, primacy and preeminence, characteristic of the house style of the Metropolitan Museum under
the directorship of Philippe de Montebcllo.
The liberally used adjective British is, of course, particularly fra ught. It has
remained erratic in its definition and manifestly unreliable as a marker of allegiance. Here in the exh ibition-ignoring the Dutchman Nicolaas Henneman,
who gained admission solely as William Henry Fox Talbot's loyal retainerphotographers are variously identified as "English:' "Welsh;' "Scottish," and
"Irish," and o nly in six inexplicably special cases as "British:' The curators did
not invent the confusion, of course, and, when we arrive at Last with the British

186

THE MUTE TESTI MONY OF THE PICTURE

TAGG

in India, we would do well to recall it was the English flag thal flew over the

stinging to some, to the superior, artistic calotype prints submitted by French

coat of arms of the East India Com pany, whose motto was: Auspicio regis et

exhibitors. 7 ln the recoil of a suitably chastened national pride, the heroes of

senatus Anglia (By right of the King and lhe Senate of England). As Tom Nairn

the Metropolitan Museum show-those cultivated English gentlemen of learn-

has argued, the strange absences and evasion of British statehood are rooted

ing and leisure-found themselves compelled to organize for the improvement

in the archaic peculiarities of the pre-modern fo rmation of the English state

of national standards, helped along by the carefully negotiated loosening of

that marked it out from the wave of state-ordered, nationalist capitalisms that

Talbot's patent restrictions, wh ich opened the way for lhe fo rm ation of the

emerged in the course of the nineteenth ccntury.s For all the unifying effects of

Photographic Society in t853.

the Victorian capitalist economy, the centripetal pull of metropolitanism, and

As their numbers grew, these gentlemen -amateurs (as the exhibition would

the political mobilization and spoils of imperialism, Britain always lacked the

have them) enabled the practice of photography to break out of t11e restricted

unity lent by the nationalist Imaginary, since it never had Lhe second revolu-

circle of Talbot's relations, associates, and scholarly friends that had largel y

tion that might have made it a modern nation-state. Instead, it chose Empire

defined the limits of calotype practice in its first decade. Schooled as they were

and self-proclaimed "Greatness." lhe same historical blockage accounts for

in the intimate pleasures of the connoisseurship of drawings and prints, these

the simultaneous universalizing and elision of Englishness in the consolida-

wealthy gentlemen, we are told, valued the paper print for its softening of detail,

tion of the Anglo-British stale. The result is the singular instability of the very

its massing of light and shadow, and its graphic smudginess, which seemed

Britishness that the exhibition wants to hold in place as the marker of a guar-

more artistic and, in any case, set thcir work apart from the mechanistic sharp-

anteed identity and a generalized authorial presence-the vantage point from

ness of the retail trade. It was a sense of distinction these gentlemen took to

which everything is seen and said.

their weekend retreats, away from the clamor of city life and the din of industry.

Already. then, the framing of the exhibition shows cracks. Yet its story of

ature as a mirror for English temperament, romantic ruins, striking geological

"British photographs from paper negatives" had a decided momentwn, capable

features, ancient oaks, castles, vistas, landed property, good fishing, and hunt-

of carrying it far ther than we might have been led to expect. Previous accou nts

ing estates: this is what interested them and this .is what the exhibition sets us

of the history of early photography had for the most part assumed an almost

up to expect-though it is then hard to fit the itinerant work of Roger Fenton

immediate decline in the use of Talbot's paper negative process following

or the steam locomotives of the dauntingly named James Mudd into this frame,

the introduction in i85t of collodion glass negatives that seemed to combine

a frame in which, as Geoffrey Batchen has remarked, "every image is presented

the brilliance and precision of the daguerreotype with the reproducibility of the

as a singular acl of personal expression, and therefore as artistic rather than

paper print. lf it had held to this conventional knowledge, Impressed by Light

capitalist in

aspiration."~

would have come to an abrupt stop halfway round the first gallery, after a

Focusing on its story of the work of "men of learning and leisure" and

wall of Talbot and a wall of Hill & Adamson, William Coll ie, and Benjamin

their aspirations to photographic art, Impressed by Light cultivated a marked

Brecknell Turner. Undeterred, however, the exl1ibition pressed on to reveal what

blind spot for the more mundane questions of production, replication, and

it described as "a previously unrecognized artistic flourishing of the calotype

the economy of images. Yet it was precisely in relation to these issues that the

among British photographers working on several continents during the 185os:'6

introduction of the negative-positive process and the discovery of the latent

lu keeping with the persistent national myth of the character-forming bene-

image represented seismic events. This other history, however, found itself

fits of defeat, the spur to this flourishing proved to be a national humilfatio n

all but entirel y erased from the exhibilion whose agenda, once the scene had

of sorts. ll was al the Great Exhibitio11 of the Works of Industry of All Nations,

been briefly set, hurried viewers on past Talbot's didactic double image of the

held at the Crystal Palace in London in t851, that the paying public had its first

Reading establishment-the quaintly suburban factory that Talbot set up in 1843

real chance to see the commercial and artistic potentialities of photography. The

under the direction of his erstwhi le valet, Nicolaas Henneman. Here, though,

products of the camera thus took their place in the spectacle of industrial and

in the back ga rden, we briefly glimpse the kind of productivity Talbot himself

tech nological marvels that now came to seem magicaUy disconnected from the

imagined for his invention: reproductions of works of art, copies of engravings

bitter labor truggles marking the preceding two decades. The only blemish

and prints, and the mass production of plates for photographically illustrated

fo r this grand British plan was thal, as the Reports by the juries subsequently

books like The Pencil of Nature (t844- 46) and Sun Pictures in Scotland (1845)-

recorded, all the gold medals went to American dague rreotypes and, more

aJI areas in which Talbot's process enjoyed success, even if it was never able to

187

188

TAGG

189

THE MUTE TESTIMONY OF THE PICTURE

compete with the daguerreotype for market share in the enormously profitable
field of commercial portraiture. 1t is a back garden seen from the window of a
train that is going elsewhere. As Batchen again has sharply observed, Impressed
by Light "carefully erases any signs of commerce or labor from the historical

record, leaving the impression that the caJotype was entirely the preserve of
the independently wealthy."9 In this, Batcl1en adds, the exhibition "repeats the
efforts of the Photographic Society itself, which sought to maintain a clear division between those 'in trade' and those ' in society:"10
This division, however, was not perhaps as consoling as it ought to have
been. The tight-knit preoccupation with the artistically validated picturesque
themes of late romantic and naturalist art betrayed an overinsistenl hymn to
Land, property, and place that, warding off the insecurities of the time, sought to
offer the confirmation of continuity and belonging to relatively arriviste professional men- modernizers, technocrats, and industrialists who, focusing their
cameras in their leisure hours, quite pointedly turned their backs on the dirt
and conflict of the industrial sources of th eir new wealth. 11 It was a careful habit
of shielding the eyes that they would take with tl1em on their travels-first,
on what the curators call "the New Grand Tour;' seeking out the great si tes
and landscapes of European cultural heritage: the Acropolis, Pompeii, Rome;
Bruges, Naples, Segovia, Madrid, Salamanca, Moscow, Malta; Mount Etna, th e
Alps, tl1e Pyrenees.

the architectural and archaeolog.ical marvels that began to be marketed to a new

Here, the sudden change of scene allowed the exhibition to mark another

kind of consumer-trnveler. We are dealing here with a different class of operator

crucial factor prolonging the life of a process that the tex1:books say was super-

but also a different class of photographic product. This is not an insignificant

seded after 1851 by t he new glass plates. Collodion glass plates, in fact, repre-

point and the exhibition had to work hard to blunt its impact. For, even as it

sented a far from convenient choice for the traveling photographer. They were

expanded its geographic range, calotype practice was also becoming diversified

heavy and fragile and they had to be exposed in the camera and developed

and institutionally stratified. Jts story was no longer just the story of art and

while still wet-so they had to be prepared and proces ed on the spot, meaning

amateurism or, indeed , the story of a singular medium.

that the camera operator had lo transport an entire photographic laboratory

In the exhibition itself, the dispersive momentum of travel, tourism, antiq-

and track down local sources of chemical supplies. Lightweight paper negatives

uities, and commerce gave visi tors hardly a pa use as it swept them into the

worked just as well when dry as when freshly prepared, so they could be made

last room-into a baked, dry, ochre world that sweltered "Under an Indian

in advance, stored, exposed, and developed later, eliminating the need to travel

Sky" (fig. 1). u Yet something else will prove to haunt the humid, heat-hazed

with a portable darkroom. 12 These decided advantages came in to their own par-

landscapes we find here, and it is at this juncture-with the story of the flour-

ticularly in hot countries, where wet-plate photographers had to labor in stifli ng

darkrooms with sticky emulsions that were constantly in danger of picking up
insects and dust. By comparison, for travelers of a certain class, the paper plate
was a civilized convenience far from home.
TI1e technical advantages of paper negatives made them attractive, however,
not just to artistically inclined amateurs and men of means but also to entrepreneurs-enterprising characters such as Charles Clifford, who worked to make
a business from the sale of images of the new tourist destinations, especially of

ishing development of the self-conscio usly artistic "medium" already unraveling-that we are plunged into an encounter Lhat suddenly outru ns t11e stage
managers' control. The calotype itself may have been well prepared to survive
the rigors of the journey, readil y adaptable, as it was, to work in hot and dusty
climates. The exhibition narrative fares less well, changing color, losing its
breath, and pulling up short on the banks o f the Ganges at the Suttee Chowra
Ghat in Kanpur, th e major up-country bulking point for the cotton- and oilseed trade along the river.

Fig. 1.
View of " Under an Indian Sl\Y,"
t he final gallery of Impressed
by Light: Bri tish Photographs
from Paper Negatives,
1840-1860, an exhibition
held at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York,
25 Seplember-31 December

2007.

190

Fig. 2 .

THE MUTE TESTIMONY OF THE PICTURE

TAGG

The waters here, at least in the museum's print (fig. 2), are smooth and

the scene of ho rrendous events but also or the undoing of those great tales of

John Murray (Scottish,

1809- 98).
Suttee Ghat Cawnpore, 1858,
albumen silver pnnt from
paper negative, image: 33 x
43. 1 cm (13 x 16 IS/1 m.);
mount: 40.3 x 51.6 cm
(15?/s x 20s;"' in.).
New Yori<, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.

Fig. 3.
John Murray (Scottish.

1809- 98).
Suttee Ghat Cawnpore, 1858,
paper negative, image: 38 x
48 cm ( 14 is;,. x 18?/e in.).
New York, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.

opaque, Oat and impenetrable like the sky. 111e low, scattered trees could be

British invention.

comin g into leafor dyi ng. The buildings behind the perimeter wall are hard to

On 26 June 1857, after a twenty-day siege, an embattled party of British offi-

make out in the tangle of the trees' branches. 111e sun comes in low from the

cers and troops unde r General Sir Hugh Wheeler. together with the women,

right. Nothing moves except one of the two men squatting on the open ground

children, and servants who had taken refuge with them in their hastily fortified

leading down to the river. The scene seems windless and airless. Even the two

barracks at Kanpur. negotiated an agreement with the local rebel leader and

diminutive squatt ing figures who look back at the photographer seem only

self-proclaimed Pashwa, Nana Dhondu Punt, to give up Lheir guns and treasure

to point up the general sen e of de erti on and the distance that has opened

in return for boats Lo carry them from the Suttee Chowra customs ghat on the

between the m and the ca mera lens. Like the curators, we may find it hard to

Ganges downstream to Allahabad. Ea rly the ne>..'t morning, however, as they

resist taking the seeming lack or eve nt as the sign of bleak emotion. This is

boarded the vessels at the stepped embankment, the British detachment was

certainly heavi ly overwritten ground. The inscription in the lower left corner of

mowed down by concealed artillery and rifle, with surviving troops and reput-

the large-scale print tells us th is: Suttee Ghat Cawnpore. And, again, in pencil

edly all male children being cut to pieces by cavalry and locals who had joined

on the moun t: Chowrah Suttee or Massacre Ghat Cawnpore. The exhibition

the fray. 1 Some 120 to

title adds a third variant: "Suttee Ghat Caw11pore," Scene of the Massacre-the

confined in a house in the nearby compound. But on the evening ohs July, as

massacre, note.

130

women and children were then taken prisoner and

a British force of European, Madras, and Sikh troops with guns of the Royal

The image, in all its inadequacy and excess. is caught in the field of the cap-

and Bengal Artilleries approached Kanpur from Allahabad, leaders of the reb-

tion. There is a tea r in the fabric o f the ex11ibition's story. We have arrived at

els or perhaps the sepoy guard themselves resolved to slaughter the women

191

192

193

THE MUTE TESTIMONY OF THE PICTURE

TAGG

and children, who were shot and cut to pieces in the courtyard of the house in

gathered in the exhibition's final room-John Murray, officer in the Bengal

whk h they were imprisoned. It is said that the walls were covered with bloody

Medical Service; the Madras Army captain Linnaeus Tripe; John McCosh, sur-

handprints and the floor was littered with severed human limbs. The next day,

geon with the Bengal Native Infantry; Major Robert Tytler and Harriet Tytler,

the bodies of the dead, together with survivors, were thrown d own a nearby

his wife; army engineer Cha rles Moravia; and Richard Oakeley, Fellow of the

dry well. It was the day before British fo rces recaptured Kanpur, bringing their

Royal Geographical Society-were themselves militar y officers and government

own brutal reprisals, and exactly three weeks after the signi ng of the agree-

appointees who, in the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion, mobilized the latest

ment to evacuate the entrenchment. As Lie utenant Colonel G. W. Williams,

imaging technology for the purpose of mapping, graphing, and marking o ut

commissioner of military police, wrote in the synopsis of what he viewed as

for memory an occ upied territory that had p roved so suddenly and violen tly

the "indisputably authe nti c" evidence he collated in i859: "Grief here yields to

unreadable to the British autho rities and forces. 20

indignation, and the thirst for revenge; yet adequate retribution can never be
inflicted. Tue punishment of the crime is beyond the power of man.''

15

Contrary to what is implied by the sweep of the exhibition, however,

this is not how the camera came to the subcontinent. As John Falconer and

Tue army surgeon and photographer Jo hn Murray arrived at the scene that

Christopher Pinney have shown, photography arrived in India as early as 1840,

engrossed a nation in February t858, less than a year after the massacres and

as an import vario u ly take n up by enthusiastic amateurs, by those with an eye

a year before Lieutenan t Colo nel Wi ll iams began his in vestigation. 16 Williams,

to commerce, a nd by individuals with aspirations to science. 21 And, as pho-

even after his "most searching and earnest inquiries;' acknowledged the pain

tographic practice steadily spread in the next decade and a half, it did so not

of representing unrepresentable events "over which;' he wrote, "I would gladJy

solely in the hands of those linked in one way or another, th ro ugh commercial,

draw a veil, but that duty forbids my concealing aught of the real fac ts attend-

military, o r administrative connectio ns, to the agencies of the colonial state. By

17

ing the closing of the Cawnpore tragedy." Murray, o n direct commission from

the mid-185os, in Calcutta and Bombay numerous Indian- r un studios were in

the governor-general, Viscou nt Charles John Ca1ining, a nd following bis habits

business and, o f th e hundred members of the Photographic Society of Bengal,

of practice as well as Lord Can n.ing's precise instructio ns to capture "as clear

patronized by Lady Canni ng herself, abo ut th irty were Bengalis. 22 As might

and complete an impression" as possible of the mil itary works and sites associ-

be expected, given the way they learned their practice and given their desire

ated with the mutiny, uncapped the lens of his camera and made his exposures:

to accommodate and adapt, these educated Indian amateurs and their com-

two v iews of the ghat on the G:mges; one of the h ospital in General Wheeler's

mercial counterpar ts produced images o f the ir countrymen and families not

entrenchment; and o ne of the well itself, a lready o n its way to becomfog an

much different fro m the Lemplate images Eu ropeans collected of Lhemselves.

actual and virtual pilgrimage si te for the veneration by the British of their mar-

But they were strikingly differen t from the photographs that bega11 to accumu-

tyrs.

18

Of these, the exhibition, true to its bias, gives us only the finer quality

negative (fig. 3) and a tonall y harmonious print. But what do they show us? In
this exhibition-or against it- not a little.

late through other channels.

By the mid- 185os, the colonial police had al ready begun using photography to identify victims and old offenders. There were also calls to photograph

In 1858, the Brili h dream of empire as a benign, civilizing, and mutually

legitimate slate pensioners in Bengal and prostitutes in Luck.now, and instruc-

enhancing society found itself rudely shattered by a military rebellion of sepoys

tions were issued by the central administration for local governments to collect

against British occupation that the British still remember as the "Indian Mutiny"

photographs of tribes and castes under their jurisdiction. Military officers were

and that their political class preferred at the time to see as the product of local

active in responding to such commissions, alongside clergymen, army doctors

misgovernment rather than a the di rec t outcome of endemic tensions created

like Murray, and civil servants who were encouraged to take cameras with them

by the condition and policies of British colonia l ruJe.

19

The bitter a ntico lo-

on their travels a nd to deposit copies with the office of the governor-general.

nial struggle, wttich for a time posed an e ffective threat to British control of

After ~the great co nvulsion" of 1857, their efforts acquired an official standing,

the Gangetic Plain, broughl appal ling atroci ties and reprisals fro m both sides

overseen by the Political and Secret Department and culminating in the publica-

that still live in the lexicons of national memory and that made it clear that

tion betwee n 1868 and t875 of the eight volumes of The People of India. Th is

the landscapes calml y sur veyed by the camera were spaces of irreconcilable

compendious work, compiJed under the patronage of the then Viceroy Lord

visions. H ere, then, the story suddenly ceases to be one of the triumphal flour-

Canning, may have troubled membe rs of an Indian elite to whom it was shown

ishi ng of pho tographic art, since the photographers of the Indian landscapes

in the India Office Library in London, but it was not intended to speak to them.

23

24

194

THE MUTE TESTIMONY OF THE PICTURE

TAGG

Rather, it was meant to educate the agents of a colonial service that, after 1858,

ll seems that, from the viewpoint of the Suttee Chowra Ghat, here in the

fell directly under the British Crown. To such eyes. the eight bound volumes

final room "Under an Indian Sky;' there is li ttle left unscathed in the history

presented a comprehensive field guide to identifying the vexingly multifarious

the exhibition has given us. The singular photographic medium, the gentle-

native groups that had so recently demonstrated attitudes to British rule ranging

man's practice, the flour ishing of art, the prid e that all th is is British: none of it

from acquiescence and compliance to fierce hatred and violent rebellion. There

survives. Whatever it may be that is, as Talbot wrote, "impressed by Lhe agency

was thus a compelling relationship between the accumulation of photographic

of Light alone:' it is not to be so lightly fixed. What is "brought out" in the sensi -

documents, the pacification process, and a recentl y unnerved concern to cali-

tiz.ed paper always falls short of our investmen ts and desires, whatever lens we

25

brate m ore finely the sustainabiHty of British rule in lndia. If Canning's ambi-

take to it. But, then, as we try to say what we see, we find that what is stained

tious photographic projects-including the commission to John Mu rray-lacked

into the paper goes beyond our stories and what it is we want. "This, however, is

the systematization of later interventions, they even so marked the beginning of

not grounds for silence, any more than it is fodder for the banal belief that the

that process of collection, coUation, categorization, and textualization tluougb

picture speaks for itself. The puzzling impassiveness of Murray's "Suttee Ghat

which the Indian subcontinent was gridded and framed as a field of knowledge,

Cawnpore," Scene of the Massacre is itself a challenge as the place where a certain

an administrative terrain, and a landscape of British institutional memory.

history comes to grief. The exorbitant, inadequate image burnt into the paper

It was hardly unusual, of course, for colonies to be the testing ground for

comes to us from somewhere else, but that is also its challenge. Before it, we

new techniques and technologies. This was obviously the case for military tac-

are called to bear witness to its sight, to seek to grasp its resonance as a specific

tics and hardwaTe, but it was also the case for techniques and technologies of

event of meaning, and to go on trying to find an idiom for whatever it is that

visual control. Nowhere did these seem more needed than in India. 26 Colonial

Talbot again, musing on the prospect ofloss, once called "the mute testimony

administrators and officiaJ.s complained over and over again of Lhe deceit tl1ey

of the picture:' 29

took to be inherent in the natives, clouding investigation and undermining the

status of the evidence they collected.27 The camera presented itself as a tool to
solve this problem, promising more than just a means of procuring evidence.
In what British officials saw as an environment ofignorance, superstition. and
deceit, this latest product of British ingenuity seemed the very instrument to
impress upon native minds once more the difficulty of escaping a superior colonial vigilance. As Samuel Bourne remarked in tlle narrative of his photographic
expedition through Kash mir: "From the earliest days of the calotype, the curious tripod with its mysterious chamber and mouth of brass taught the natives
of this country that their conquerors were the inventors of o ther instruments
beside the form idable guns of their artillery, which, though as suspicious per28

haps in appearance, attained their objects with Less noise and smoke."

Bourne's shameless image is brutally apt. In the years after the violent rebellion, guns and cameras rolled across the landscape in unsparing ways. 111 addition to hangi ng mutineers, the British had many they captured "blown from

1.

Notes
Perhaps at the outset I ought to say that l found myself rather anxious about my
lack of credentials to speak on the topic at issue in this volllme, and this anxiety
no doubt set the course of the path I decided to follow. lt may appear to have led
me rather far from the intended destination. So l will have to ask to be given an
extremely long leash in order to reach my goal, which is not the goal of unmasking a misrepresentation or reinstating some truth but, rather, that of following

a certain history to rhe point where, on ground it was not the first to believe it
had fully made its own,lt begins to be llllraveled by the very thing for which it
thought to give us a story.
2. Quotations drawn from the exhibition texts came from the "Past Exhibitions"
pages of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website: http://www.metmusellm
.org/special/se_event.asp?Occurrenceld={ 447 A8D76-4D51-4E8C- BiA.4
B888EF85D7CC}; and http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event
.asp?Occu rrenceld={5 BC2298F-FC6B-u D6-94C7-00902786B F44}, accessed

cannon" -a method of ex:ecutfo n in which convicted rebels were set before a

ca nnon's mouth and blown to pieces. Fomented in the aftermath of the Indian

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2007/impressed-by-lighl; and

April 2010. Almost identical versions of these texts are currently available at:

and otber recent "iars, this was, of cou rse, the climate in which the jingoism

hup://www:metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/ press-room/exhjbitions/2003/

of a fully imperial Britishness was, in effect, invented as an apparatus of civic

first-survey-of- french-dagucrreotypesmany-among-the-earliesr-photo-

capture and a means to mobilize the divided populations of England, Scotland,

Wa les, and Ireland. So, in Tndia, some stood before cannon and others before
cameras. lt is indeed a telJing image.

graphs-ever-ta kenopens-at-metropol itan- museum-on-september-23, accessed 4

May2012.
3. Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, i840-1860, exhib-

ited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 25 September 2007 to

195

196

THE MUTE TESTIMONY OF THE PICTURE

TAGG

pattern of strategic overcoding familia r from the scopic field of Orientalism.

31 December 2007, was described as "the first major ex:hlbition to survey British
calotypes," presenting "works by forty artists, including such masters as WiUiam
Henry Fox: Talbot, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Roger Fenlon,

In 1856, the Irish caJotypist ). M. Murray had on hand papers that he had prepared
in 1849 and 1850, still in usable condition. See Larry J. Schaaf with Roger Taylor,

Benjamin Brecknell Turner, and Linnaeus Tripe, as well as many talented but

"Biographical Dictionary of British Calotypists;' in Roger Taylor, Impressed by

unr ecognized artists" (see note 2). lhe majority of the works on view. it was also

Ligl1t: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860, ex.h. cat. (New York:

stressed, had never before been ex:hibited or published in the United States.

Tf1e Dawn of Photography: Fre11ch Daguerreotypes, 1839- 1855, on view at the

Metropolitan Museum from 23 September 2003 to 4 January 2004, was presented

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007). 352.

13. wUnder an Indian Sky" was the title given Lo the ochre-painted gallery that represented the fo1al room and penultimate section of the exhibition. It is also lhe lit le

as "the firs t survey of key monuments from photography's earliest moments:

of chapter nine of the accompanying catalog: Taylor, Tmpre.~sed by Light, 118-31.

including "hitherto Lu1seen exam ples of scientific, ethnographic. exploratory. and

The phrase was drawn from an "Address" in thefoumal of tlie Pliotogrnplric

historical documentary pho tography oflhe 1840s and 1850s, as well as porlraiLS,
city views, landscapes, nude studies, and genre scenes that arc renowned as key

early monwnents in the history of photographic art" (see note 2).

In the catalog accompanyi ng impressed by light, the guest curator, Roger
Taylor, also tells the story of being prompted by Jan et Buerger, author of French

Society of Bombay (1855): 16, quoted in Taylor, Impressed by Light, 119.

14. W. J. Shepherd, A Persona/ Narrative of the Outbreak nnd Massacre nt Caw11porc,

during tire Sepoy Revolt of 1857 (Lucknow, India: printed at the London Printing
Press, 1879), 70-79.
15. Lieutenant Colonel G. W. Williams." ynopsis of Evidence of the Cawnpore
oah Alfred Chick, Annn/s of the lndinn Rebellion, 1857-58 (Calcutta:

Daguerreotypes (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1989), a catalog of the Cromer

Mutiny," in

Collection in the International Museum of Photography al George Eastman

Sanders, Cones, 1859), 668. 705.

House, to do something along the same li nes for "British daguerreotypes." He

16. An editorial in the London Times declared that the events al Kanpur "engrossed

replied that "a book on British calotypes might be more appropriate, as British

the atlention of the whole country . . . for, whatever the issue of this rebellion,

photographers had invented the process: Roger Taylor, Impressed by light:

and whatever other prodigie and horrors il may bring forth. the Massacre of

British Photographs from Pnper Negatives, 1840- 1860, ex:h. cat. (New York:

Cawnpore and the name ofNena Sahib wlll hold rank among the foulest crimes

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), ix.

and the greatest enemies of the human race to the end of the world." Editorial,

4. The pho tographers identified as l3rilish" are the Englishmen Robert Henry
Cheney, Alfred Huish. and Joh n H. Morgan; the Scotsman John Muir Wood;

The Times, 17 September 1857: 8, column A, quoted in Taylor, Impressed by

light, 126.

the u11placed Charles Moravia; and Robert C hristopher Tytler, born in Jndia of

q. WilJiams, "Synopsis o( Evidence;' 692.

an Irish father. Three o ther photogrophers are identified as "Unknown Artist,

British School.~ As a servant of William Henry Fox Talbot, Nicolaas Henneman

J8. Cannings's instructions to Mu rray were conveyed in a letler, now in the National

is allowed into the ex:hibition, though Dutch, while the imporlant fig ure Antoine
Claudet, who spent his enlire photographic career in England, is excluded
because he was born in France.
5. Tom Nairn, "The Twilight of the British State:' in idem, The Break-Up of Britain:

Crisis nnd Neo-Nationalism, 2nd ed. ( London: Verso, 1981), 11-91.

6. See note 2.
7. Reports by the Juries 011 tlie Subjects in tlie Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition

Archives of Ind ia, from C. Beardon, secretary to tl1e government of India, to John
Murray, 22 January 1858, q uoted in Taylor, Impressed by light, 125.
19. See Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988); and, more particularly, Rudnngshu
Mukherjee, "'Satan Let Loose upon Earth': The Kanpur Massacres in India in the
Revoll of 1857," Past & Present, no. 128 (1990): 92-u6.
20. Not subject to q uite the same constraints as the exhibition, though equally committed to artistic biography and to the same celebratory tone, the exhibition

Was Divided (London: Printed for the Royal Commission by William Clowes &

catalog briefly concedes that "(t]his relationship with officialdom is one of the

Sons, 1852).

features that distinguished Indian pho tography from its counterparts elsewhere

8. Geoffrey Batchen, "Photography: Latent History;' Art in America (2008): 57.

9. Batchen, "Photography: Latent Hislory," 57. ll is th us Batchen's view tl1at the exhi-

bition tells us "almost n othing" about "the actual history of the calotype." Balchen.
"Photography: Latent History," 55.
10. Batchen, "Photography: Latent History," 57.
11.

12.

and accounted for much of its direction d uring tJ1e 1850s and 1860s." Taylor,

Impressed by Light, 127. For :i less accommodating view of this "relationship

with officialdom; ee James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and tlie
Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: Un iv. of Chicago Press, 1997).
21. Christopher Pinney, Camern lndica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs

The displacement and fan tasy inve lment negotiated through this attachment to

(London: Reaktion, 1997), 17. In October 1839, William O'Shaughnessy reported

the picturesque-which stripped the countryside and landed property of con

tlict and history, turning them into the Lropes of an eternal Englishness-thus

ing." In December of the same year, three long articles on Louis-Jacques-Mantle

went beyond the compensations of an internal exoticism. Woven together with 3

Daguerre's invention appeared in the Bombay Times, including a translation

simul taneous attachment to science and an archiving knowledge, they trace out a

of Daguerre's own pamphlel on the daguerreotype. In Calcutta, cameras were

to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta on his experiments with "photogenic draw-

197

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THE MUTE TESTIMONY OF THE PICTURE

TAGG

advertised for sale by January of the following year, and, by March 1840, 7/te

Calcutta Courier was reporting an Asiatic Society meeting in which daguerreotypes of Calcutta itself were exhibited. See Christopher Pinney, 711e Coming of
Pliotograpliy in India (London: British Library, 2008). 9. See also John Falconer,
"Photography in Nineteenth-Century India;' in Christopher Afan Ba)ly, ed., 1/te

Raj: India a11d the British. 1600-1947 (London: alional Porlrait Gallery. 1991),
264-n.
22. When the Photographic Society ofBombay hcld its first meeting on 3 October

the British, 1600-1947 (London: National Po rtrait Gallery, 1991), 252-63.

26. On tills. again, see Ryan, Picturing Empire.

27. Pinney, Camera l11dica, 20. On "the untrustworthiness of native evidence in

India; see.. for example, Norman A. Chevers, A Ma1111al of Medical /11risprudence

for India, l11cl11di11g an Outline of a History of Crime against the Person i11 India,
20d ed. (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1870), 85, cited in Pinney, 1he Coming of
Photography i11 India. i9.
28. Samuel Bourne, "Narrative of a Photographic Trip to Kashmir lCashmerej and

1854, three of its thirteen fou nding members were aL~o lndia11. On early Indian

Adjacent Districts: British /oumal of Pholograp/Jy (1863): 51, quoted in Falconer,

involvement in photography, see Falconer, "Photography in Nineteenth-Century

Photography in Nineteenth-Century India; 264. Bourne's metaphoric linkage

not, however, new to such a colonial context. Traveling in Egypt with his

India;' 275-77; and John Falconer, Jndia: Pioneering Pltotograpliers, 1850-1900,

\\las

exh. cat. (London: British Library and Howard & Jane Rickells Collection, 2001 ).

friend Gustave Flaubert in 1849, the photographer and travel writer Ma.xime Du

23. J. Forbes Watson and Joh n William Kaye. eds., The People of India: A Series of

Camp complained of the difficulty he had in making his servant, Hadji lsmael,

Photographic Jllustratio11s, with Descriptive Letterpress. of the Races and Tril1es

of Hindustan, 8 vols. ( Londo n: India Museum, 1868-75). For the history of the

pose without moving in order to lend a sense of scale to landscapes and monu-

publication, see John Falconer, '"A Pure Labour of Love': A Publishjng History

convey the depth of naivety of these poor Arabs. I told him that the brass tube of

ments. "I finally succeeded:' he wrote, "by means of a trick whose success will

of The People of India," in Eleanor M. I light and Gary Sampson. eds., Colonialist

the Jens jutting from the camera was a cannon, which would vomit a hail of shot

Photography: lmag(in)i11g Race and Place (London: Routledge, 2002).

if he had tJ1e misfortune to move-a stor y which immobilised him completely, as

24. The most striking expression of horror was voiced as early as 1869, in a let-

can be seen by my plates." Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on

Tour; A Narrative Drawn from Gustave F/aubert's Travel Notes and Letters, ed. and

ter from London to the cientific Society at Allygurh by the prominent Indian
Muslim political leader, judge, and educator Syed Ah med Khan. Syed Ahmed
Khan, quoted in Lieutenant Colonel George Farquhar Irving Graham, Life

a11d Work of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (Edinb urgh: William Blackwood and Sons,
1885), 188-89. See also the discussion by Christopher Pin ne)' in The Comi11g of
Photography i11 lirrli11, 41-49.
Pinney speculates that it was not so much denigrating photographs that out-

trans. Francis Steegmuller (Roston: Little, Brown, 1972), 102.

29. Jn a" olice to the Reader" inserted in the second fascicle of 2he Pencil of Nature
(1844), William Henry Fox Talbot advised: "The plates of the present work are
impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist's
pencil." In the same volume, in h is notes on a calotype depicting several shelves
bearing "articles of ch ina: Talbot speculated that "should a th ief afterwards

raged Syed Ahmed Khan as the implicit sleight of the u11itary and normative

purloin the treasures-if the mute testimony of the picture were to be produced

framework that the collection as a whole imposed on the visibility of lndfa's

against him in court-it would certainly be evidence of a novel kind:' William

heterogeneous and hierarchicaUy differenliatcd classes, castes, and communities,

Henry Fox Talbot, T11e Pencil of Nature (1844], facsimile erution (New York:

exhaustively subsuming them within the narrative economy of colonial admin-

Da Capo, 1968). pl. 3.

istration. John Falconer takes a different view. He reads Syed Ahmed J(h311's
response to the ph otographs in Tlie People of Tndia as springing from the embarrassed recognition of what they reveal: "the lack of educational and social progress which, he felt, justly relegated his country to an inferior status and shamed

his son into disowning it." Fakoner, "'A Pure Labour of Love:" So. Drawing
attention to this dispute while paying close altention to the circurn!.tances
d escribed in Ahmed Khan's narrative, Ajay Sinha has tried to hold the conflicting
interpretatfons of his letter together as indexicaJ oftbe bundle of contradictory.
self-assertive, and self-crit ical impulses felt by British-educated and "cosmopolitan" Indians, then and since, toward a "modernfarn" that is, at once, universalist
and imperialist-a bundle of impulses that evokes a blush precisely at the point
"where an Indian subject becomes aware of its own phantasmagoric appearance."
Ajay Sinha, "Response: Modernism in India: A hort History of a Blush; Art

Bulleiin 90, no. 4 (2008): 567.

25. See Pinney, Camera J11dica; and Christopher Pinney, "Colonial Anthropology in
the ' Laboratory of Mankind:" in Christopher Alan Bayly, ed.. 7l1e Raj: India and

199