"Exploring the Empire"

Description:Image: "The Gateway of the Hooseinabad Bazaar, Lucknow. India" 1875

The idea of photography and travel is deeply woven into the British nineteenth century obsession with‘Empire’. At this time, looking at photographic pictures like the one above became an important yet highly ambiguous way for late Victorians to come to an understanding of other cultures. Stone and Caddick’s collected photographs offered to bring audiences into a much closer relationship with what was viewed: here were real people, architecture and landscapes, all vividly and beautifully captured in a form that promised to last forever.

However, cultures are not fixed, but ever-changing and diverse. Examining a photograph such as the above, we see how the domes and architecture suggest a scenic sense of grace, harmony and peacefulness. Yet is this photograph an accurate representation of India? Is this image which Stone bought for his collection a ‘documentary’ of the landscape or is it a romanticised image catering for the British colonial perceptions of India? Noticeably, the photographic focus is dominated by the ‘exotic’ architecture rather than the market traders who exist anonymously in the picture. What were their names? What were their lives like? What did they think of British people like Stone?

A vast amount of work has been written on the problem of how the British ‘looked’ at other cultures. In the ground breaking postcolonial essay ‘Orientalism’ Edward W. Said argues that images of non-western countries by white colonial institutions and travellers are dominated by the limited and imaginary ideas of the ‘Orient’. According to Said, ‘The Orient was a place that was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.’ Such images may have been alluring, but they were also fictional.

So how should we look at the landscape above, part of the Stone collection? Does its simply offer to document a piece of historic architecture? Or does it establish an imaginative ‘exotic’ landscape? Does it seek to avoid the realities that went with empire, such as social conflict and poverty? Were travellers, photographers and collectors like Stone and Caddick bridging gaps between culture, or making them wider? Did they celebrate cultures, or exploit them? How would a contemporary photographer portray this scene today?