>In the second half of the 19th Century, photography became one of the British Empire's most persuasive instruments for knowing - and classifying - India.
>A new exhibition - called Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855-1920, and organised by DAG, the Delhi-based art gallery - brings together nearly 200 rare photographs from a period when the camera was deployed to classify communities, fix identities and make India's complex social differences legible to the colonial government.
>Spanning 65 years, the exhibition maps an expansive human geography: from Lepcha and Bhutia communities in the north-east to Afridis in the north-west; from Todas in the Nilgiris to Parsi and Gujarati elites in western India.
In a way, this could be seen as similar to the figures that surround the edges of maps by 17th-century cartographers like John Speed, whose maps are enlivened by stereotyped depictions of "a gentle woman", "a Scotch man", "a citizen", "a citizen's wife", "a noble man", "a country man", "a Highland woman", etc.
[OP] Tartan_Samurai | 16 hours ago
>In the second half of the 19th Century, photography became one of the British Empire's most persuasive instruments for knowing - and classifying - India.
>A new exhibition - called Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855-1920, and organised by DAG, the Delhi-based art gallery - brings together nearly 200 rare photographs from a period when the camera was deployed to classify communities, fix identities and make India's complex social differences legible to the colonial government.
>Spanning 65 years, the exhibition maps an expansive human geography: from Lepcha and Bhutia communities in the north-east to Afridis in the north-west; from Todas in the Nilgiris to Parsi and Gujarati elites in western India.
No_Gur_7422 | 16 hours ago
In a way, this could be seen as similar to the figures that surround the edges of maps by 17th-century cartographers like John Speed, whose maps are enlivened by stereotyped depictions of "a gentle woman", "a Scotch man", "a citizen", "a citizen's wife", "a noble man", "a country man", "a Highland woman", etc.