The Rijksmuseum’s exhibition, Crossings, in the photography gallery is showing 19th-century British colonial photography and contemporary works by the French-Sri Lankan artist Vasantha Yogananthan in dialogue to consider links between past and present. The show is the result of a two-year research project that studied the Rijksmuseum’s collection of British colonial photography in detail for the first time, including the identification, cataloguing, and description of over 1,200 photographs. The exhibition presents just a selection of these images alongside the work of Yogananthan, who, more than a century after the photographs were taken, explored his own background in the same region.
The Rijksmuseum photography collection comprises 19th-century images taken in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), Singapore, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet, when much of the region remained under British colonial rule until the mid-20th century. In many cases, the photographs were commissioned for European and American audiences who were not familiar with the region, as well as images made for tourists.
Two of the most famous photographers of the time were Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902) and Samuel Bourne (1834-1912), who captured images of temples, cities, landscapes, and people. The invention of photography in the 1840s had revolutionised the way in which the world was documented and interpreted, not only in Europe, but also in Asia. As early as the mid-19th century, the British authorities in India launched an impressive photographic survey of architecture.
Captain Linnaeus Tripe carved a particular niche in the history of 19th-century photography, documenting aspects of southern Indian and Burmese culture. As an officer in the British army, operating under the auspices of the East India Company (EIC) in the 1850s, he created a visual inventory of celebrated archaeological sites, religious and secular buildings, as well as geological formations and landscapes. Introduced to photography in Britain at a time when it was regarded as a pastime, Tripe realised that it could be used as an effective tool for recording unknown cultures, an asset also recognised by the EIC, which was amassing information on the territories it occupied. By using large-format cameras and wax paper negatives, Tripe achieved remarkably consistent results, bearing in mind the infant state of photographic technology and the huge challenges that the heat and humidity posed to photographic chemistry, as well as the need to travel vast distances over rough terrain.
Tripe’s training as a surveyor, where the choice of viewpoint and careful attention to visual details were essential, are key to the artistic success of his photographs.. With a recommendation from a local patron, he was interviewed by the political and military wing of the EIC, and in 1839 was accepted as a cadet, assigned to the 12th Madras Native Infantry. At that time, the EIC no longer held the trading monopoly it once had, although it remained the significant agent of the British government. It administered vast territories and an immense population in the three regional provinces known as the ‘presidencies’ of Madras, Bombay, and Bengal.
Mid-19th-century photographers had a bewildering array of choices of photographic processes, Tripe chose the calotype technique that would give him large-format negatives from which many prints could be made; calotype was also more forgiving of the Asian heat, humidity, and monsoons. Other photographic processes were subsequently developed. The calotype was first developed in 1841 as a salted paper print allowed contact prints to be produced from a master paper negative. For the first time, photographs could be published in large editions.
Tripe returned to India in 1854, taking with him his photographic equipment and chemicals. He first began photographing India when he was on leave in Mysore. This period was a transitional time in the history of Britain, India, and Burma, and for the EIC, transformed from the world’s largest and most powerful commercial enterprise into conqueror and then the virtual ruler of large parts of India and Burma. Gathering information to administer this huge area became critical for governing it; the more the Company knew about India and Burma’s cultural and religious heritage, the more effectively it could govern.
His first studies were of the huge, sprawling complex, Hullabede, which had been the capital of the Hoysalan dynasty spanning the 11th to the 14th centuries – the legacy of its elaborately carved were Tripe’s first subject matter. His approach to documenting them echoes the blend of disciplined forethought and aesthetic sensitivity that he displayed in his initial work in England. Instead of taking numerous individual picturesque studies, he made a systematic survey recording the temples in a sequence that was topographically and architecturally interconnected.
When Tripe’s work at Mysore was exhibited in Madras, it led directly to his appointment as official photographer for a diplomatic mission to the Burmese court in 1855, the jury selecting images for the show reporting that: ‘The jury are of the opinion that Captain Tripe is entitled to a First Class Medal’. His distinctive combination of photographic skills attracted the attention of the EIC, which urged the Bengal and Madras Presidencies to ‘employ photography rather than draughtsmen.’ It suggested that photography should be used to ‘obtain representations of scenes and buildings… with accuracy and economy of time and money,’ an important consideration to keep costs under control.
When Lord Dalhousie was preparing for his mission to Burma, he wanted to employ a photographer and was aware of Tripe’s successful showing at the Madras exhibition. Tripe spent three months working under the most arduous conditions and created a portfolio of 120 photographs, diligently revealing aspects of Burmese culture, architecture, and landscape for the first time. He also added scenic shots as well as imperial and domestic architecture to the anticipated documentation of cultural and religious subjects.
In 1856, after the Burma mission, he was appointed official photographer to the Madras Presidency. He would now be fully occupied with photographic rather than military matters, and as he said – this work would be the ‘first attempt at illustrating in a complete and systematic manner the state of a country by means of photography’. His brief was southern India, an area rich in sacred sites, including India’s holiest temples for Shiva and Vishnu. Overlaying at least 1,000 years of what is now Tamil Nadu’s culture were the consequences of British conquest and modernisation introduced by the EIC, both of which he recorded in detail.
Tripe headed to the famous pilgrim town of Madurai and the Hindu temples of Seeringham and Tanjore, renowned for the scale of their construction and their elaborate decoration. Technically, the stupendous height of some of the architecture required using the rising front of his camera to its very limits. He also used deep, receding perspectives to dramatise open doorways into arcades leading to the most sacred core of a temple, intimating a pilgrim’s journey from the outside world to the spiritual.
This body of work in south India generated 290 large-format negatives, and from these, he made nine portfolios containing a total of 17,745 prints – ordered by the government. He also produced a 19-foot-long panorama entitled Tanjore: Great Pagoda, Inscriptions around Binanum (1858), the first of its kind in photography, recording the ancient Tamil inscriptions that run around the base of the Brihadishvara Temple at Tanjore. However, at the height of his career things were about to change. With overwhelming problems including illness, lack of chemicals, and the monsoon, progress in producing that daunting number of prints, 17,745, was worryingly slow. He was still mounting and finishing them in 1860, 18 months after starting. Meanwhile, the new Crown colony of India, which had nationalised the EIC, had begun reforms, questioning every system and every expense. Tripe was forced to close his studio in 1860, after which he all but abandoned photography at the age of 38.
By the 1860s, professional photography had become well established in India, numerous commercial studios had been established in such places as Shimla, Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. Samuel Bourne took advantage of this – a British photographer known for his prolific work in India, from 1863 to 1870. Together with Charles Shepherd he set up Bourne & Shepherd, opening a studio first in Shimla in 1863 and later in Calcutta. They met with success, and Bourne & Shepherd, were responsible for some of the most iconic photographs of the time with their images distributed internationally.
Bourne was a relentless traveller, commenting in correspondence, ‘As there is now scarcely a nook or corner, or glen, a valley, or mountain, much less a country, on the face of the globe which the penetrating eye of the camera has not searched’. Continuing, ‘From the untrodden snows of the Himalayas to the burning shores of Madras the camera is now a familiar object’’. Bourne made three celebrated photographic expeditions to Kashmir and the Himalayas between 1863-66 and published a celebrated series of reports in the British Journal of Photography between 1863 and 1870 and further published Ten Weeks With a Camera in the Himalayas in 1864.
At its peak, Bourne & Shepherd had agencies in London and Paris, and they were commissioned to photograph many important Raj events, including the Delhi Durbar held to commemorate the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary as Emperor and Empress of India in 1911. Sadly, a fire at the premises of Bourne & Shepherd over 25 years ago destroyed a large part of its archival collection and the building itself, which had slowly fallen into a sad state of repair over the years, finally closed in June 2016 – the end of one of the world’s oldest established photography studios.
Another photographer of note was Charles Thomas Scowen (1852-1948), again a British photographer who worked in India and Ceylon. After arriving in Ceylon, he first set up a studio in Kandy and went on to open a second business in Colombo. Scowen and his assistants produced images for the tourist market as well as for commerce and industry. By 1893, he had sold the company to try his hand as a tea planter before returning to England at the turn of the century.
The exhibition in Amsterdam presents 11 of Tripe and Bourne’s works alongside nine by other early photographers. While the photographs appear to offer an objective view of the world, however, looking with a modern eye, it is clear that these photographs naturally reflect the interests of the people who commissioned them, which may not always sit comfortably in today’s world. That said, they were often the first-ever photographs of important monuments and archaeological sites, making them remarkably valuable sources of information from often vanished worlds.
The exhibition combines and contrasts the colonial gaze with that of Vasantha Yogananthan (b 1985), who builds on the rich photographic tradition that has developed in the Indian subcontinent, who visited the same areas, more than a century later, to explore his own background. On show is a set of images from Yogananthan’s series A Myth of Two Souls (2013-21). For this project, he made 13 trips to India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to explore the ways in which ancient stories, myths, and traditions continue into the present day.
This series depicts scenes from the Ramayana, the celebrated Hindu epic symbolising the struggle between good and evil. Written around 300 BC, it tells the story of the exiled prince Rama and his wife Sita, who is kidnapped and held captive by the demon of Lanka – Ravana. In the end, Sita regains her freedom, but only after a long and bloody struggle. In his personal interpretation of the epic, Yogananthan uses old photographic techniques such as colouring prints by hand, bring photographic techniques full circle.
Until 12 October, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.nl
