Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire by James R.Ryan; Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs by Christopher PinneyReview by: Gary D. SampsonTechnology and Culture, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 902-904Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the History of TechnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25147433 .

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TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

OCTOBER

1999

VOL. 40

Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the

British Empire.

By James R. Ryan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. 272;

illustrations, notes/references, bibliography, index. $38.

Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs.

By Christopher Pinney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. 240;

illustrations, glossary, notes/references, bibliography, index. $29.

As a new form of visual representation in the nineteenth century, photog

raphy offered a significant means of strengthening Britain's grip on its

empire. This notion has been generally acknowledged in a growing body of

cross-disciplinary scholarship linking culture and power. James Ryan and

Christopher Pinney are thus far from alone in their mutual concern with

the political implications of the medium; together with others in the his

torical revisionist camp, they recognize a debt to Michel Foucault, Edward

Said, and John Tagg, who is noteworthy for his studies of photography as a

politically discursive field. In many ways Pinney and Ryan deepen our

understanding of the processes whereby colonial authority was vigorously reinforced not merely by the scientific application of photography to doc

umenting the empire and its inhabitants but also by the culturally biased

framing of landscapes and imaging of character "types"?signifiers of dif

ference for the western beholder. Though such a thesis is not entirely orig

inal, the value of both books is that they go further than any previous treat

ment in detailing how photographs supported the western assumption that

its civilizing mission would triumph over social and racial barbarism espe

cially engendered by the peoples of Africa, India, and China. Perhaps most

significantly, Pinney extends his field of inquiry to examine how inhabi

tants of the Indian subcontinent have themselves inventively assimilated

the technology and art of photography into their lives.

Ryan's scope in Picturing Empire is indeed ambitious, and much to his

credit he has succeeded in locating a myriad of sources that highlight the

use of photography on campaigns of scientific and military exploration into regions under surveillance. Geography is his specialization, and it is

clearly reflected in his recurring references to the Royal Geographical

Society (RGS) and allied organizations that served to foster or sponsor the

expeditions of empire. His account of the RGS sponsorship of the Royal

Engineers' military campaign into Abyssinia, for instance, is fascinating as

an early case of photography's employment as a system of scientific authen

tication that paralleled the activities of cartography and reconnaissance.

Ryan locates images produced for this and numerous other campaigns and

expeditions within the sweeping view that even the most pleasurable visual

aspects of photography may be construed as material evidence of imperial

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BOOK REVIEWS

rhetoric. As compelling as this view is, however, Ryan tends to weaken his

position by treading a fine line between well-thought-out argument and an

overzealousness to prove his point, which after awhile almost seems moot.

Even where the evidence is abundant that more personal artistic motives were at work in the use of the camera, as in the case of Samuel Bourne's

1860s expeditions in the Himalayas, photographic images ultimately become ciphers of imperial conquest and violation for Ryan; in essence, the

British "hunted" for images of exotic terrain and peoples as so many tro

phies of adventure, just as they might pursue wild game for sport. But if the

book fails to meet the expectations raised by its promising subtitle, it is

chiefly owing to a lack of extended visual analysis of the photographs as

hybrids of art and technology, despite Ryan's earnest attempt to closely relate aesthetics and photography to the discourse of imperialism.

In contrast to Ryan's wide-ranging exploration of photography and

empire, Christopher Pinney follows a narrower, if no less challenging, path in his engaging three-part study of Indian photographs. A lucid writer, he

develops a strategy of semiotic and social-historical method that he assid

uously applies toward the understanding of pictures of Indians. Photo

graphs produced or used for nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British anthropological studies conform to one of two paradigms of repre sentation. Pinney recognizes the first as a

"salvage" approach, in which indi

viduals are reduced to specimens of a receding world that is rapidly being supplanted or assimilated by "modern" culture, as in the instance of the

"primitive" Juangs of Bengal, whose young women are coerced into posing for the camera not in their newly adopted attire but in the scanty adorn

ments of their former lives. Ryan, too, treats the native as a subject of the

probing camera, but Pinney's narrative is particularly instructive in show

ing how photographs served to define the dark-skinned other on the basis of external markers such as clothing and objects associated with occupation or social behavior, as well as physiognomic appearance. Specific ethno

graphic groups were also targeted as being either a threat or of potential service to authority, pronouncements especially evident in the eight vol

umes of The People of India (1868-75). The second paradigm is thus char acterized as "detective" or "identificatory," whereby the native body was

scrutinized and measured to a sometimes frighteningly absurd degree as

proof of racial and social degeneracy.

Pinney politely debunks earlier efforts to distinguish a peculiarly Indian mode of photographic representation in pictures taken by Indians of each other. Compared to the ethnographic "indexical idiom" where the photo graph is comprehended as a direct trace of the subject's physical presence, Indian studio portraiture allowed for the projection of an idealized or

moral image of the self, which to a certain extent was based upon the prece dent of "artistry" traditionally associated with western painting. Studio

photographers such as Lala Deen Dayal or Ramchandra Rao and Pratap

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TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

OCTOBER

1999

VOL. 40

Rao gave dignified presence to their sitters in the immediate years before

and after the turn of the century, while others stepped beyond the bound aries of realism by freely manipulating the painted backdrops and technol

ogy at their disposal in order to express something of the subject's interior

life. The author's own fieldwork in the industrial central Indian town of

Nagda and the nearby village of Bhatisuda led to a host of astute observa

tions concerning the complex religious, social, and imaginative interplay of

pictures in the lives of the inhabitants. This is illustrated in a carefully orchestrated selection of photographs, including wedding and memorial

images, that draw the reader into an intricate discussion of their multilay ered significance. Here the technology of the camera is no longer privileged as an emblem of surveillance or control, but is a mediating practice subject to all manner of special effects?collage, double exposure, montage, arbi

trary color, and overpainting. Photography thus becomes a vehicle for the

individual's imaginative escape from the constraints of physical locality,

identity, and time. Pinney's book is a bracing example of cross-cultural

study at its best.

GARY D. SAMPSON

Dr. Sampson is associate professor of art history at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is coedit

ing a collection of essays on colonialist photography and is planning an extensive catalog for

an exhibition of Samuel Bourne's Indian photographs, about which he has published in the

journal History of Photography.

American Design in the Twentieth Century:

Personality and Performance.

By Greg Votolato. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998;

distributed in the U.S. by St. Martin's Press. Pp. xviii+301; illustrations, notes/

references, bibliography, index. $69.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

For those among us who teach design history and attempt to create order

out of chaos with twentieth-century design in the United States, it is

encouraging to discover a new source that provides a structure to assist in

this monumental task. In American Design in the Twentieth Century: Per

sonality and Performance, Greg Votolato addresses several perennial prob lems inherent in any study of design: What is design and what are its main

functions? Who are designers? Is design restricted to formal professional work or is it inclusive of any activity that involves creative expression?

While the title of this volume indicates that the focus of the study is

American design, its stated purposes deal with these questions of design on

a more universal level: "to introduce how design evolved as an activity and as an idea" and "to contribute to a realistic understanding of design at the

end of the millennium as part of an ongoing process of correcting and

improving the environment in which we all live and of establishing a gen

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