Photographs as history

August 30, 2011 01:09 pm | Updated 01:09 pm IST

OEB: Book Review: The Marshall Albums (Photography and Archaeology). _ by Sudeshna Guha

OEB: Book Review: The Marshall Albums (Photography and Archaeology). _ by Sudeshna Guha

Over the last 30 years, the bibliography of books on colonial photography, by the British as well as native photographers, has become quite long. The earliest was The Last Empire: Photography in British India , 1855-1911 by Clark Worswick and Ainslee T. Embree (Aperture, 1976); since then, many more publications have accompanied landmark curatorial projects, significantly advancing the study of photography in colonial India. The Marshall Albums is part of this effort and the Alkazi Collection should be commended for continuing to publish, with remarkable consistency, its vast archive and creating opportunities for extending research.

Primary documentation

Since the 1980s, Subaltern Studies, its re-inscription of the colonial experience from the perspective of the oppressed and the dominated, semiotics, and the politics of representation have affected what scholars choose to study. The colonial experience and the creation of popular culture, both for the imperialist and the native, have brought photography centre stage. Not only is photography the “primary documentation”, it is also the first modern industrial technology of representation that grew hand in hand with Euro-American empire-building and with popular demands for images that could be acquired, circulated, and thus created opportunities for self-representation to the under-represented classes of people and objects.

An exciting group of scholars feeds this growing interest in colonial photography; their research is inspiring in the way it makes images which their makers often saw as mimicking art but not necessarily art per se , available to art historical interpretation and theorising. Given that much of the critical writing the Subaltern Studies and politics-of-representation enquiries have produced depends on the written text as the primary historical source, photography offers different questions, propositions and points of view.

The Marshall Albums has, apart from the images, scholarly essays that provide us with plenty of insights into how photographs represent history and how they make heritage. Indic monuments were objects of fascination for colonial travellers and later authorities. As the British Empire took control, it sought to become the custodian of the Indic past and developed institutions that acted on its behalf. Alexander Cunningham founded the Archaeological Survey of India in 1861; it was reorganised in 1898 during Lord Curzon's viceregal tenure and, under John Marshall, the third Director General (1902-1928), the ASI rapidly expanded.

The images in The Marshall Albums are a visual record of this time when photography was an important documentary and a conceptual tool for conserving and imaging the Indic past. As Guha succinctly states in her introduction, the book is an opportunity to imagine the “thematic and chronological space that extends beyond Marshall and his times ... to explore the ways in which we can analyse relationships between archaeological evidence and its representation, critique the propagation of ‘scientific archaeology' for nurturing partisan politics,” and also to explore “the importance of receiving monuments, antiquities and their photographs as socially salient objects.”

The essays in this volume are successful in fulfilling this agenda. Michael S. Dodson examines the role of archaeology as part of the larger civilising mission designed by the British. Tapti Guha-Thakurta examines the growing practice of photographing monuments in the context of increased control that the colonial state sought to exert. Using the images that document the restoration of Sanchi, she demonstrates that the photographs were composed to project archaeological restoration as a ‘nearly complete recovery' of the living site, thus dissembling the extensive damage caused by excavation.

Christopher Pinney looks at photography as an interpretative and imaginative device. He explains how the photographs on Sanchi, which overwhelmingly focus on the sculptural panels — especially the gateways — transform three-dimensional architecture into two-dimensional narrative and thus change the meaning or function of a monument. Continuing with Buddhist sites that obsessed the ASI, Robert Harding analyses Rajgir and Taxila and shows how Cunningham, and later Marshall, used ancient Chinese Buddhist accounts to reduce the complex urbanism of these cities to their Buddhist or Greek elements. Such interpretive acts, which led to the under-excavation of non-religious areas or older layers, continue to influence the way pilgrims and tourists engage with the sites.

An archaeological tool

Sudeshna Guha's essay focusses on photography as an archaeological tool, bringing out how both appear to offer authentic and unmediated data that guarantee a particular version/vision of the past. Her careful analysis of the photographs — including the ones with the perfected monument and those that capture the actual process of re-inscription — enables the reader to recode archaeology as an interpretive discipline, not an objective science.

An astounding collection of photographs from the Marshall albums, this volume has images also from the 60 albums that are now in the collections of Cambridge and Durham universities. An extremely thoughtful and well-designed publication, this will be found worthwhile by all those engaged in art history, archaeology or cultural studies.

Given the bounties offered by the book, one is impelled to look for a discussion on the technologies of colonial photography, how they relate to the practice of archaeology, and how the photographs in the albums compare with those in other contemporary volumes. Maybe, future publications by these scholars will illumine these aspects and raise questions that are even more exciting.

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