The Colonial Eye

Early Portrait Photography in India

Samuel Bourne, John Burke, Francis Frith & Co., A.W.A. Platé, Fritz Sarasin, Paul Sarasin, Shepherd & Robertson, W.L.H. Skeen, Edward Taurines, Albert Thomas Watson Penn, Westfield & Co.

One of the world’s broadest and best collections of historic portrait photography in India is being exhibited for the first time. The collection was originally thought to have been lost in the war and was first returned to Berlin in parts in the 1990s. Now some 300 photographs offer a comprehensive overview of portrait photography on the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the nineteenth century. Alongside images by such distinguished photographers as Samuel Bourne, Shepherd & Robertson, A. T. W. Penn and John Burke, the exhibition also includes works by less well-known authors. The surprisingly diverse ethnographic photography of that time is contrasted with genre-like street photos of craftspeople and with portraits of Muslim princes and princesses, maharajas and clan chiefs. One quality that most of the early portraits share is the specifically European view: Das Koloniale Auge (The Colonial Eye). The country and its inhabitants were to be inventoried and surveyed in the second half of the nineteenth century in the service of science and colonialism.