While making my way through the narrow, dusty and populated lanes of Lado Sarai in south Delhi, I couldn’t help but think of a time when Delhi was bare of the infrastructure and population that burdens it today. As I found my way to Tasveer’s new exhibition ‘Bourne & Shepherd: Figures in Time,’ at Exhibit 320, the work on display showed exactly that and so much more from an India that is still unknown to many. Drawn from the photographic holdings of MAP (Museum of Art & Photography, Bangalore), the exhibition showcases a range of landscapes, architectural views and portraits by the photographers Samuel Bourne, Charles Shepherd as well as the Bourne & Shepherd studio, the Calcutta (now Kolkata) branch still in operation today.The minimalist layout in the gallery works perfectly for the photographs as the viewer is drawn into 19th century India, where travellers and employees of the East India Company chose to photograph their journeys and also document important historical structures in various cities across the country. British photographers were of course the first to create these visuals by using a formalist approach in their composition to capture picturesque views in their representation of India. One such commercial photographer and explorer was Samuel Bourne, who arrived in India in 1863. Having let go of a bank job in Nottingham, Bourne chose to travel extensively in India in order to make a photographic career out of landscapes. His love for the Himalayas was well known and it was in Shimla that he established his photographic studio, in collaboration with William Howard. With Howard’s departure, in came Charles Shepherd, a photographer but also an expert printer with whom Bourne set up Bourne & Shepherd. Their Calcutta branch gained much patronage, especially by the royalty, European nobles and the rich Indians of the time.One of the most striking things about the exhibition is the magnitude of the prints considering that back in the day, owing to the technology of that time, the original prints were produced in a much smaller size. The finer details are thus more visible and this lends space to a more contemporary interpretation of those works. In most of Bourne’s photographs of historical monuments, there are a couple of noticeable commoners lurking about- and while one might think that there could have been an element of the manufactured pose given that the images were made using long exposures, it is also interesting to note that Bourne might’ve used human elements scantily in order to denote the difference in scale between the structure and the humans. It is clear that both Bourne and Shepherd had deep admiration for the historical significance of what they photographed, thus also revealing what caught the colonial eye in the photographic practice that existed then.Especially striking are the large prints of the port in Calcutta, Fatehpur Sikri and a top-view of Bombay’s elite quarter, Colaba. While it is clear that Bourne had a preference for the more scenic landscape, his photographs of busy ports, temple-ghats (in Varanasi) and daily-life scenes are as important and telling of those times. He often moved from the still to the dynamic in his choice of subjects and that is admirable, especially for that century’s aesthetic and practice. Moving to the portraits section of the show, the first photograph is by Charles Shepherd- an extremely arresting portrait of a group of men called the ‘Affreedies,’ at the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. A significant departure from the posed portraits that most royals commissioned in that period (some on exhibit), Shepherd has a very modern style of shooting from the front, but framing just a side of the gun-yielding men. None of them are looking into the camera and that itself distances the viewer from the subjects in a manner that they don’t need to necessarily focus on just the men, but also the environs that they were photographed in. While Bourne travelled extensively in the subcontinent, producing over 2000 negatives and established a noteworthy tradition of travel photography, the Bourne & Shepherd studio then popularized those in the form of postcards, book illustrations and album views. Even today, postcards bear photographs which retain an aesthetic that is focused on the scenic landscape, thus keeping the tradition of the Bourne & Shepherd studio alive and kicking in the age of the selfie, where the background is supposedly just incidental.Bourne & Shepherd: Figures In Time is showing at Exhibit 320, Lado Sarai, New Delhi from 30 May - 10 June 2016. It will travel to the cities of Jodhpur and Baroda in 2017.
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