books
Raj Photography Books
From Kashmir to Kabul
As international events draw attention to the people and landscapes of Afghanistan and Pakistan, images of these war-torn countries are becoming increasingly familiar. The harsh beauty of the region has been luring photographers since the Victorian age, the most famous of whom were William Baker and John Burke. Their photographs of the "Great Game" - a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling for the power struggles of British and Russian imperialism - were an inspiration to the writer, and remain some of the most poignant images of the British Empire.Read more
Burke + Norfolk
An exceptional then-and-now investigation, suffused in the tragedy of two Afghan wars. Simon Norfolk, a modern war photographer, echoes Burke's work in a profound and captivating way as he probes the artifacts of today's conflict with Burke's 1878-80 Afghan war album by his side. There is nothing else quite like it in photography.Read more
Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road
A beautifully printed book of Asian images by one of the greatest early international photographers, Felice Beato. Produced in connection with the exhibition of Beato's work at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the book includes many more of his Indian images than the exhibition.Read more
Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh 1859-2006
A well-researched and fascinating book about an area of the subcontinent - the northeastern Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh - rarely seen in Raj photography. The camera made it here as early as 1859, and it is worth reflecting on the fact that the finest images here were taken by Dr. Benjamin Simpson just a few years later (the same Dr. Simpson known for his extraordinary photographs of Kandahar in 1880).Read more
The Waterhouse Albums
This work by John Falconer, Curator of Photography at the British Library, is one of the finest single works on an early photographer of India. The author - the leading scholar of Raj photography - reconstructs a critical time in Waterhouse's career in exquisite detail. The text is crisp, pitch-perfect with fact and shorn of wanton speculation. Read more
Picturesque Views
A 2008 German exhibition catalog with nice illustrations and some new information about photographers, but also full of curious opinions (Baker and Burke are dismissed as unworthy picturesque photographers), small factual errors, and limited profiles of photographers like James Craddock, who actually began working a decade or more earlier than given credit for here.Read more
The Prince of Photographers Raja Deen Dayal
A nicely printed and designed book about the foremost Indian photographer during the Raj, Raja Deen Dayal. The book covers many of his finest photographs, and the rise and fall of his studio in Hyderabad. With historic documents, advertisements and other memorabilia, written by a historian of Hyderabad.
Visualizing Indian Women 1875-1947
A superb book, with close readings of images loaded with history and crisp observations. Karlekar really knows how to decode photographic gestures. The richness of imagery still available, in this case from private collections all over India, is amazing.Read more
Re-visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915
While initial chapters recount well known early Indian photographic history, the next ones comprise an intelligent and thought-provoking analysis of photography in Bengal and the role it played in mediating cultural relations between colonizers and the emerging Bengali middle and upper classes.Read more
Aperture and Identity
This exceptional 2009 magazine volume from Marg brings together a number of essays by new researchers. Much of the material and many writers are with the Alkazi Collection of Photography, which even supplied images for the beautiful ads. This is the first volume in a new thematic format by India's 60 year old Marg.Read more
nautch
s. A kind of ballet-dance performed by women; also any kind of stage entertainment; an European ball.