Photography arrived in the harbour city of Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) asearly as 1840, via trade, as well as through European explorers and government officials. With the establishment of India's first photographic society in the city in 1854, the medium was used for documentation and later, even taught as an art form. Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mumbai became one of the largest centres of photography's patronage and dissemination in India, underscored by practitioners like Dr. Narayan Daji (C. 1828-1875), a medical doctor and brother to the acclaimed Indologist, Dr. Bhau Daji.
Originally known as the Victoria and Albert Museum and renamed as TheBhau Daji Lad Museum, it’s Mumbai’s oldest – since 1872. This museum was the recent setting for the Exhibition from which this book derived from. The Artful Pose depicts photography that was done in studios around 1855-1930. And the studios did indeed take their cameo-style posing seriously, with props, sometimes a narrative, varied shades of gazes and occasionally yes, a fakir.
Drawn from the remarkable Alakazi collection of photography, this catalogue explores the arrival, dissemination and advancement of studio photography in Mumbai, through both European and "native" cameramen. A keen recording of castes and tribes of British officials, in time, gradually expanded to the experimentation with portraiture and performance in numerous studios such as S. Hormusji and Shapoor N. Bhedwar, among others. By the late-nineteenth century, professionals and independent firms, such as Bourne and Shepherd and Lala Deen Dayal and Sons, enlarged the ambit of photography's influence, with enduring images of families, events and landscapes, beautifully illustrated in official and personal souvenir albums, cartes-de-visite and even panoramic views of Mumbai City, a rising industrial metropolis at the time.
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