Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850–1900

Edited by Maria Antonella Pelizzari

With contributions by Julia Ballerini, Stephen Bann, Partha Chatterjee, Janet Dewan, Nicholas B. Dirks, John Falconer, Sophie Gordin, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Narayani Gupta, Peter H. Hoffenberg, Thomas R. Metcalf, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, and Christopher Pinney

Published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press

344 pages, 10 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches, 183 illustrations, paperback, ISBN 9780300098969

Publication date: May 11, 2003

Description

This book investigates the different cultural roles played by photographs of Indian architecture from the latter half of the nineteenth century, an inquiry stretching from their prehistory to their migration into book illustrations, calendar art, and religious imagery. Beyond the apparent purposes of these images—as picturesque views, scientific records of architectural past, political memorials, travel mementos, textbook vignettes—deeper considerations influenced the way their makers worked in selecting, framing, composing, and populating their representations. Shaping the viewer’s thinking about what they represented, these images remain enduring records of a way of seeing, of minds as well as monuments, and exist today as artifacts of the visual culture of colonialism.