The Imperial Aesthetic: Photography, Samuel Bourne and the Indian Peoples in the Post-Mutiny Era / Xavier Guégan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Guégan, Xavier, author.

Series:

Photography in Asia ; 3.

Asian Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2026.

Photography in Asia ; 3

Asian Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2026

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art--History.

Art.

Asian Studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (231 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Leiden ; Boston : BRILL, 2026.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Samuel Bourne (1834-1912) is one of the best well-known Victorian English commercial photographers to have worked in British India, where he sojourned from 1863 to 187. Soon after his arrival he started a business with the experienced photographer Charles Shepherd. Within a few years, the firm Bourne & Shepherd became recognised as being a directing influence over British-Indian photography. Their work provides a valuable tool to evaluate the Victorian representations of India, the setting of a colonial mind. The Imperial Aesthetic: Photography, Samuel Bourne and the Indian Peoples in the Post-Mutiny Era focuses on Bourne’s commercial and artistic photographs of the Indian population, produced during successive field trips he undertook in the 186s and the portraits taken by his firm until Shepherd’s departure at the end of the 187s. It engages with the relationship between colonial ethnography and photography, and reflects on the balance between aesthetic, cultural and political considerations in the aftermath of the ‘Mutiny’.

Contents:

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Photographs, Illustrations and Maps

Maps

Introduction: To Conquer with “Less Noise and Smoke”

1 An Anglo-Indian Society in Transition

1 From Liberalism to Indirect-Direct Rule: The Creation of a Cultural ‘Visibility’

2 Photographing India and the Orients

2 Categorising, Perceiving and Experiencing Indians in the British Raj

1 Bourne the Photographer: A Successful Career

2 The ‘Heroic’ Explorer: How to Build a Photographic Indian World

3 Experiencing Colonial Categorisation and the Objectification of the Indian People

4 A Distorted View of the World

3 Governmentality, Photography and the Historicising of British India

1 The Mutiny and Its Photographical Representation

2 Ordering a Perceived Disordered World

3 Indian Men and Women as Symbols of Conflict and Pacification

4 Harnessing Modernity, Capitalising on Imagined Human Landscape

1 Religion and Scientism, Bourne’s View of a Modern World

2 Imperial Progress and the Tale of Two Indias

3 Making Indians a Living Museum: Tribes and Ethnic Minorities

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Contents of Bourne & Shepherd’s Royal Photographic Album of Scenes and Personages Connected with the Progress of HRH the Prince of Wales through Bengal , the North West Provinces , the Punjab and Nepal with Some Descriptive Letterpress (1876)

Appendix 2: Photographic Processes Discussed and Used by Bourne and Bourne & Shepherd

Selected Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Guégan, Xavier The Imperial Aesthetic: Photography, Samuel Bourne and the Indian Peoples in the Post-Mutiny Era

ISBN:

9789004750814

OCLC:

1600522504

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004750814 DOI