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

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-75082-1
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 3, 190 Seiten, Format (B × H): 193 mm x 260 mm

Reihe: Photography in Asia

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 1870. 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 1860s and the portraits taken by his firm until Shepherd’s departure at the end of the 1870s. 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’.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Guégan, Xavier

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Fotografie
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte

Über Autor(innen)

Xavier Guégan (PhD 2009) is Senior Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Winchester. He co-edited, with Martin Farr, The British Abroad since the Eighteenth Century (two volumes, Palgrave, 2013). He researches, publishes and lectures on British Indian history and French North African history. His main expertise concerns the correlation between photography and history, imperial culture and ideologies, and comparative analysis and memory.