(co-authored with Deborah Hutton) Raja Deen Dayal: Artist Photographer in Nineteenth-Century India. New Delhi: Mapin and The Alkazi Collection of Photography, 2013
This book aims to delve into the work of celebrated photographer Raja Deen Dayal (1844-1905) thro... more This book aims to delve into the work of celebrated photographer Raja Deen Dayal (1844-1905) through a close analysis of primary source documents. In this book we attempt to sort out dates once and for all, providing no date that is not corroborated through primary source evidence. Moreover, in order to present a multifaceted view of the photographer’s career and oeuvre, our analysis brings together various details regarding the business-side of photography with those relating to the artistic choices and patronage links that Dayal crafted, while also considering the larger historical and cultural context in which he worked. Ultimately, this book foregrounds surviving photographs as the most important primary documents and relies on them, through the visual clues that they hold, to narrate a story about Dayal as photographer, his studio, and photographic culture in late 19th century India.
Appendix A: Timeline
Appendix B: Dating
Appendix C: Signatures and Wet stamps
(chapter 1) in Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in Nineteenth-century India. Co-authored with Deborah Hutton. New Delhi: Mapin and The Alkazi Collection of Photography, pp. 52-79, 2013
This chapter explores the early part of Raja Deen Dayal’s career in an attempt to identify the fo... more This chapter explores the early part of Raja Deen Dayal’s career in an attempt to identify the formative moments that came to shape his photographic practice, roughly covering the years from 1864 through 1887. It first examines Dayal’s training at Thomason College at Roorkee, including the principles of land surveying that he learned there and how they impacted his early photographic images. Thereafter it examines Dayal’s work in the Public Works Department of the Central India Agency at Indore under Agents Major Henry Daly and Sir Lepel Griffin. The chapter also looks at Dayal’s two-year furlough in 1885–87 that marked his formal transition from an amateur to a professional photographer. The circulation of Dayal’s images long past their initial production made a lasting impression and still frames the way some of South Asia’s landscape and cultural heritage are seen today. This chapter is ultimately about how the landscape and architecture of South Asia became visualized within a space of public works projects via the technology of photography.
This book focuses on the Royal Ontario Museum's collection of Indian painting photographs, supple... more This book focuses on the Royal Ontario Museum's collection of Indian painting photographs, supplemented by works in other public and private collections. Through an examination of their physical qualities, and a review of primary documents and secondary literature, it lays out in broad strokes a sense of the genre's chronology and its place in the wider context of photographic practice. Instead of being a product of a uniquely Indian visual practice, I argue, painted photographs from India are part of a transcultural history of photography. They have been represented as unusual or remarkable not because of the circumstances of their historical production but because of the centrality of photographic indexicality today and the hegemonic status of the black-and-white photographic image in histories of photography. It is this, it seems, that has cast painted photographs as anomalies in the history of photography rather than as an integrated and integral part of its evolution.
Deepali Dewan, editor. With essays by Deepali Dewan, Swapnaa Tamhane, Antonia Behan, Amanda Pinatih. Swapnaa Tamhane: Mobile Palace. Toronot: Royal Ontario Museum, 2022, 55 p. , 2022
Swapnaa Tamhane: Mobile Palace accompanies an exhibition of the same name, exploring a body of wo... more Swapnaa Tamhane: Mobile Palace accompanies an exhibition of the same name, exploring a body of work by a contemporary artist that challenges colonial hierarchies between art, craft, and design. This publication is a visual journey about practice and process, conception and its manifestation. The works were created by Swapnaa Tamhane and her collaborators: wood block carver Mukesh Prajapati, printer and dyer
Salemamad Khatri, and the embroidery collective Qasab Kutch Craftswomen Producer Co. Ltd. The central artwork, Mobile Palace, features layered fabric lengths of machine-made cloth and draws inspiration from eighteenth-century tents used in South Asian and Islamic worlds as mobile palaces, Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture in India, and cotton’s history in India’s anti-colonial resistance. These elements come together in a
body of work that re-imagines the relationship between motif, pattern, and ornament. The four essays in the book explore Tamhane’s larger practice of mark-making as an act of resistance.
The older I get, the more I dislike the term ‘South Asia’. ‘South Asia’ is
a term invented in the... more The older I get, the more I dislike the term ‘South Asia’. ‘South Asia’ is a term invented in the post-WWII era in the US when academic and political forces aligned to define an area-studies model of understanding the world. I acknowledge that the use of the term ‘South Asia’ has political efficacy for diasporic communities. But what is lost?
It may seem redundant for a photography journal to have a thematic issue on photography. After al... more It may seem redundant for a photography journal to have a thematic issue on photography. After all, photography is the journal's overall concern. But this issue examining the third word in Trans Asia Photography's title is an opportunity to reflect on this foundational concept.nPerceptions of photography have changed over space and time so that photography itself emerges as an ever-evolving idea. It is fair to say that the farther we have gone down the road of photo studies, the more uncertain photography has become. Indeed, the farther we go, the more it seems that the term photography, rather than solidifying into a mass of common understanding, has refracted into many pieces, as light going through not so much a lens but a prism.
in Sarah Fee, ed. Cloth that Changed the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 221-225. , 2020
This essay focuses on this last stage, with an emphasis on printed cottons in India in the latter... more This essay focuses on this last stage, with an emphasis on printed cottons in India in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a critical moment for Indian chintz. Specifically, I argue, the arena of colonial art education reveals the dynamics of late nineteenth-century chintz production but also shaped knowledge about Indian printed and painted cottons that still impacts attitudes toward them today. By reading with, through, and against colonial publications, one can discern how colonial knowledge both hides and reveals much.
Drik Picture Library, often just called “Drik,” is the earliest and still foremost platform in Ba... more Drik Picture Library, often just called “Drik,” is the earliest and still foremost platform in Bangladesh for the production, display, circulation, preservation, and publication of photography. Founded in 1989 by Shahidul Alam (b. 1955), Drik is now an umbrella organization with different components centering on the principles of social equality, human rights, and democratic governance to bring about positive change. “Drik” means “vision” in Sanskrit. It started from the observation that most images of the developing world were produced by photographers from outside. Instead, Drik wanted to provide high-quality images of the developing world made by photographers from within. The name of the international component of its photo agency — Majority World — nods to the fact that people from the developing world, often called “minorities,” are in reality a global majority. In this and other ways, Drik’s effort toward reframing and flipping assumptions is about using visual images to challenge abuse of power and promote social justice. In this interview, Deepali Dewan speaks to the founder of Drik, Shahidul Alam, about the organization.
in Allysa B Peyton and Katherine A Paul, eds. Sourcing the Arts of South Asia: Cultures of Collecting. Gainesville: University Press of Florida., pp. 38-61., 2019
Narratives about the circulation of South Asian art in the nineteenth and early twentieth century... more Narratives about the circulation of South Asian art in the nineteenth and early twentieth century tend to focus on objects moving from India to Britain. What is less known is the continued movement of those same objects to other places across the British Empire. This essay focuses on one object in the Royal Ontario Museum's collection, a carved wooden door, as a case study to investigate the kinds of movement and the kinds of knowledge that were invigorated in a cross-empire journey. Unlike other studies on the social lives of objects, I argue that the object itself was not as important as the meanings it acquired. That is, the narrative about the door remained intact across geographic distance even when the door did not. The twists and turns in the journey of the ROM door are instructive for the ways South Asian art has been collected in Western museums and the implications of this collecting.
Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have n... more Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects domestic images and oral histories about them as a means of tracing new histories of migration. This article describes our work in collecting both family photographs and oral histories about them, with a specific focus on refugee policies, Cold War dislocations that result from the push of violence and the pull of economic opportunity, queer and trans families, family reunification, and transnational adoption. We outline the state of the field when it comes to family photography, and explain how The Family Camera addresses issues that arise in contemporary debates in this area, namely addressing some of the limitations of visual studies (which do not sufficiently attend to the multisensory registers of this genre) and oral history (which treat images as means of eliciting memories).
in Rebecca Brown and Deborah Hutton, eds. Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–present, Routledge. pp. 208-234., 2016
The debate about photography as art versus "mere documentation" is as old as the medium itself. B... more The debate about photography as art versus "mere documentation" is as old as the medium itself. But what can be discerned about this debate in a colonial context? Focusing on surviving archival documents associated with the founding of the Madras School of Art, I show that the colonial art school was a generative space for a particular kind of photography--that that took form at the intersection of art and design. This essays explores the nature of art education in the British Empire, the history of photography at the Madras School of Art, the founder Dr. Alexander Hunter's contradictory attitudes toward photography, photography's relationship to drawing, and the work of the art school's first photography instructor, C. Iyahsawmy Pillay.
in Molly Emma Aitken, ed. A Magical World, New Visions of Indian Painting, In Tribute to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Rajput Painting of 1916. Mumbai: Marg Publications, pp. 64-73., 2016
This essay exams two portraits in the Royal Ontario Museum's collection depicting Mewar rulers Ma... more This essay exams two portraits in the Royal Ontario Museum's collection depicting Mewar rulers Maharanas Fateh Singh and Bhupal Singh. There status as painted photographs reveals new insight into the history of Rajput painting. One is a photograph that has been painted on top the other is a painting made to look like a painted photograph. I show how the circumstances in which these portraits were produced demonstrate how they continued to perform the political work expected of earlier royal portraiture but in new ways. In this way, I argue that painting photographs were not just a new hybrid form of imagery but also set firmly within the trajectory of Indian painting, that court artists used photography and a phpotographic aesthetic as new tools, and that photography did not spell the end of Indian painting, as believe by some scholars, but rather another point in its continued evolution.
In 1914, Canada founded its monument to world culture, the Royal Ontario Museum, in which artwork... more In 1914, Canada founded its monument to world culture, the Royal Ontario Museum, in which artworks from India formed a part of its growing Asian collections. That same year a ship full of people from the British colony of India were turned away at Vancouver’s port. “We’ll take your artifacts but not your people”: a hundred years ago, this seemed to be the message that went out across the Dominion of Canada. In 2014, on their centennial anniversaries, there have been many events celebrating the museum and commemorating what has been termed “the Komagata Maru incident.” On the one hand, the passage of time traces how far Canada has come in embracing its multicultural population as a core of its national identity. On the other hand, that same passage of time demonstrates how fraught with tension this sense of nationalism continues to be.
In Julie Codell, ed. Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars, 1877-1911. New Delhi and Ahmedabad: Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin, pp. 136-155, 2012
This essay explores the limits of photography—both in an expansive and contractive sense— that is... more This essay explores the limits of photography—both in an expansive and contractive sense— that is, the medium’s frontiers and its limitations. It argues that the Raja Deen Dayal & Sons' Coronation Album serves as a counternarrative to the spectacle of imperial conquest by literally and metaphorically centering the Nizam’s body in specific photographs as well as in the sequence of images. In this way, the album’s construction pushes the boundaries of the medium as something more than simply a chronicler of the durbar’s events. At the same time, it argues that the commercial failure of the album, which contributed to the decline of the venerable studio, points to a shift in ocular epistemology at the turn of the century, when it seemed the photographic medium was no longer sufficient to address the representational problems or desires of a new era.
This article—formatted as a conversation between two curators—concerns affect photography and mus... more This article—formatted as a conversation between two curators—concerns affect photography and museum collections. Sparked by studio portraiture in the Jhabvala Collection of South Asian Photography in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, the authors explore the concept of “cumulative affect” and reflect on the possibilities of applying current scholarship on affect to museum collections. They argue that it is the conventions in a genre like studio portrait photography, and its repetitive nature, which define its affective force. The idea of “cumulative affect” is in direct contrast with claims that have been made about other kinds of photographs, such as images of violence, which argue that overexposure decreases the impact of such images leading to a desensitized and disaffected viewer.
In Satadru Sen and James Mills, eds., Confronting the Body: The Experience of Physicality in Modern South Asia. London: Anthem Press, pp. 118-134., 2004
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, concern about the declining state of Indian arts re... more In the latter half of the nineteenth century, concern about the declining state of Indian arts resulted in a number of debates around art education. These debates became articulated, in large part, around the figure of the native craftsman. Visual representations of the native craftsman proliferated featuring the body of the native craftsman in the process of producing his craft. This essay will explore the production of these images at the intersection of art education and colonialism. The "native" craftsman figure was constructed within colonial discourse as both the hope of Indian art's revival and as the source of its corruption. Images of the body at work came to symbolize this contradiction and became the standard representational mode for the Indian craftsman.
In Julie Codell, ed. Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press. London: Associated University Presses, pp. 29-44., 2003
Niharika Dinkar’s Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India is a dense, ri... more Niharika Dinkar’s Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India is a dense, rich, surprising, creative, mostly non-linear journey across the long nineteenth century exploring Britain’s encounter with India and India’s reaction to that encounter. The book’s basic premise is that light functioned as a central modality enabling and mediating that interaction. The larger goal here is to place empire at the center of histories of vision.
The Waterhouse Albums tells the story of a young British soldier in India at the nexus of certain... more The Waterhouse Albums tells the story of a young British soldier in India at the nexus of certain historical circumstances in the second half of the nineteenth century that facilitated his training in photography and propelled him toward major advancements in photochemistry and photomechanical reproduction. The life and work of this photographer and scientist, James Waterhouse (1842-1921), is an example of how the colonial context provided a stage as well as the impetus for the development of technologies that came to be markers of modernity for much of the European world. Despite the accolades received during his lifetime, Waterhouse has been largely overlooked by modern-day historians. This publication goes a long way in correcting this omission and makes a convincing argument about James Waterhouse’s central position in the long history of photography.
(co-authored with Deborah Hutton) Raja Deen Dayal: Artist Photographer in Nineteenth-Century India. New Delhi: Mapin and The Alkazi Collection of Photography, 2013
This book aims to delve into the work of celebrated photographer Raja Deen Dayal (1844-1905) thro... more This book aims to delve into the work of celebrated photographer Raja Deen Dayal (1844-1905) through a close analysis of primary source documents. In this book we attempt to sort out dates once and for all, providing no date that is not corroborated through primary source evidence. Moreover, in order to present a multifaceted view of the photographer’s career and oeuvre, our analysis brings together various details regarding the business-side of photography with those relating to the artistic choices and patronage links that Dayal crafted, while also considering the larger historical and cultural context in which he worked. Ultimately, this book foregrounds surviving photographs as the most important primary documents and relies on them, through the visual clues that they hold, to narrate a story about Dayal as photographer, his studio, and photographic culture in late 19th century India.
Appendix A: Timeline
Appendix B: Dating
Appendix C: Signatures and Wet stamps
(chapter 1) in Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in Nineteenth-century India. Co-authored with Deborah Hutton. New Delhi: Mapin and The Alkazi Collection of Photography, pp. 52-79, 2013
This chapter explores the early part of Raja Deen Dayal’s career in an attempt to identify the fo... more This chapter explores the early part of Raja Deen Dayal’s career in an attempt to identify the formative moments that came to shape his photographic practice, roughly covering the years from 1864 through 1887. It first examines Dayal’s training at Thomason College at Roorkee, including the principles of land surveying that he learned there and how they impacted his early photographic images. Thereafter it examines Dayal’s work in the Public Works Department of the Central India Agency at Indore under Agents Major Henry Daly and Sir Lepel Griffin. The chapter also looks at Dayal’s two-year furlough in 1885–87 that marked his formal transition from an amateur to a professional photographer. The circulation of Dayal’s images long past their initial production made a lasting impression and still frames the way some of South Asia’s landscape and cultural heritage are seen today. This chapter is ultimately about how the landscape and architecture of South Asia became visualized within a space of public works projects via the technology of photography.
This book focuses on the Royal Ontario Museum's collection of Indian painting photographs, supple... more This book focuses on the Royal Ontario Museum's collection of Indian painting photographs, supplemented by works in other public and private collections. Through an examination of their physical qualities, and a review of primary documents and secondary literature, it lays out in broad strokes a sense of the genre's chronology and its place in the wider context of photographic practice. Instead of being a product of a uniquely Indian visual practice, I argue, painted photographs from India are part of a transcultural history of photography. They have been represented as unusual or remarkable not because of the circumstances of their historical production but because of the centrality of photographic indexicality today and the hegemonic status of the black-and-white photographic image in histories of photography. It is this, it seems, that has cast painted photographs as anomalies in the history of photography rather than as an integrated and integral part of its evolution.
Deepali Dewan, editor. With essays by Deepali Dewan, Swapnaa Tamhane, Antonia Behan, Amanda Pinatih. Swapnaa Tamhane: Mobile Palace. Toronot: Royal Ontario Museum, 2022, 55 p. , 2022
Swapnaa Tamhane: Mobile Palace accompanies an exhibition of the same name, exploring a body of wo... more Swapnaa Tamhane: Mobile Palace accompanies an exhibition of the same name, exploring a body of work by a contemporary artist that challenges colonial hierarchies between art, craft, and design. This publication is a visual journey about practice and process, conception and its manifestation. The works were created by Swapnaa Tamhane and her collaborators: wood block carver Mukesh Prajapati, printer and dyer
Salemamad Khatri, and the embroidery collective Qasab Kutch Craftswomen Producer Co. Ltd. The central artwork, Mobile Palace, features layered fabric lengths of machine-made cloth and draws inspiration from eighteenth-century tents used in South Asian and Islamic worlds as mobile palaces, Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture in India, and cotton’s history in India’s anti-colonial resistance. These elements come together in a
body of work that re-imagines the relationship between motif, pattern, and ornament. The four essays in the book explore Tamhane’s larger practice of mark-making as an act of resistance.
The older I get, the more I dislike the term ‘South Asia’. ‘South Asia’ is
a term invented in the... more The older I get, the more I dislike the term ‘South Asia’. ‘South Asia’ is a term invented in the post-WWII era in the US when academic and political forces aligned to define an area-studies model of understanding the world. I acknowledge that the use of the term ‘South Asia’ has political efficacy for diasporic communities. But what is lost?
It may seem redundant for a photography journal to have a thematic issue on photography. After al... more It may seem redundant for a photography journal to have a thematic issue on photography. After all, photography is the journal's overall concern. But this issue examining the third word in Trans Asia Photography's title is an opportunity to reflect on this foundational concept.nPerceptions of photography have changed over space and time so that photography itself emerges as an ever-evolving idea. It is fair to say that the farther we have gone down the road of photo studies, the more uncertain photography has become. Indeed, the farther we go, the more it seems that the term photography, rather than solidifying into a mass of common understanding, has refracted into many pieces, as light going through not so much a lens but a prism.
in Sarah Fee, ed. Cloth that Changed the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 221-225. , 2020
This essay focuses on this last stage, with an emphasis on printed cottons in India in the latter... more This essay focuses on this last stage, with an emphasis on printed cottons in India in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a critical moment for Indian chintz. Specifically, I argue, the arena of colonial art education reveals the dynamics of late nineteenth-century chintz production but also shaped knowledge about Indian printed and painted cottons that still impacts attitudes toward them today. By reading with, through, and against colonial publications, one can discern how colonial knowledge both hides and reveals much.
Drik Picture Library, often just called “Drik,” is the earliest and still foremost platform in Ba... more Drik Picture Library, often just called “Drik,” is the earliest and still foremost platform in Bangladesh for the production, display, circulation, preservation, and publication of photography. Founded in 1989 by Shahidul Alam (b. 1955), Drik is now an umbrella organization with different components centering on the principles of social equality, human rights, and democratic governance to bring about positive change. “Drik” means “vision” in Sanskrit. It started from the observation that most images of the developing world were produced by photographers from outside. Instead, Drik wanted to provide high-quality images of the developing world made by photographers from within. The name of the international component of its photo agency — Majority World — nods to the fact that people from the developing world, often called “minorities,” are in reality a global majority. In this and other ways, Drik’s effort toward reframing and flipping assumptions is about using visual images to challenge abuse of power and promote social justice. In this interview, Deepali Dewan speaks to the founder of Drik, Shahidul Alam, about the organization.
in Allysa B Peyton and Katherine A Paul, eds. Sourcing the Arts of South Asia: Cultures of Collecting. Gainesville: University Press of Florida., pp. 38-61., 2019
Narratives about the circulation of South Asian art in the nineteenth and early twentieth century... more Narratives about the circulation of South Asian art in the nineteenth and early twentieth century tend to focus on objects moving from India to Britain. What is less known is the continued movement of those same objects to other places across the British Empire. This essay focuses on one object in the Royal Ontario Museum's collection, a carved wooden door, as a case study to investigate the kinds of movement and the kinds of knowledge that were invigorated in a cross-empire journey. Unlike other studies on the social lives of objects, I argue that the object itself was not as important as the meanings it acquired. That is, the narrative about the door remained intact across geographic distance even when the door did not. The twists and turns in the journey of the ROM door are instructive for the ways South Asian art has been collected in Western museums and the implications of this collecting.
Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have n... more Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects domestic images and oral histories about them as a means of tracing new histories of migration. This article describes our work in collecting both family photographs and oral histories about them, with a specific focus on refugee policies, Cold War dislocations that result from the push of violence and the pull of economic opportunity, queer and trans families, family reunification, and transnational adoption. We outline the state of the field when it comes to family photography, and explain how The Family Camera addresses issues that arise in contemporary debates in this area, namely addressing some of the limitations of visual studies (which do not sufficiently attend to the multisensory registers of this genre) and oral history (which treat images as means of eliciting memories).
in Rebecca Brown and Deborah Hutton, eds. Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–present, Routledge. pp. 208-234., 2016
The debate about photography as art versus "mere documentation" is as old as the medium itself. B... more The debate about photography as art versus "mere documentation" is as old as the medium itself. But what can be discerned about this debate in a colonial context? Focusing on surviving archival documents associated with the founding of the Madras School of Art, I show that the colonial art school was a generative space for a particular kind of photography--that that took form at the intersection of art and design. This essays explores the nature of art education in the British Empire, the history of photography at the Madras School of Art, the founder Dr. Alexander Hunter's contradictory attitudes toward photography, photography's relationship to drawing, and the work of the art school's first photography instructor, C. Iyahsawmy Pillay.
in Molly Emma Aitken, ed. A Magical World, New Visions of Indian Painting, In Tribute to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Rajput Painting of 1916. Mumbai: Marg Publications, pp. 64-73., 2016
This essay exams two portraits in the Royal Ontario Museum's collection depicting Mewar rulers Ma... more This essay exams two portraits in the Royal Ontario Museum's collection depicting Mewar rulers Maharanas Fateh Singh and Bhupal Singh. There status as painted photographs reveals new insight into the history of Rajput painting. One is a photograph that has been painted on top the other is a painting made to look like a painted photograph. I show how the circumstances in which these portraits were produced demonstrate how they continued to perform the political work expected of earlier royal portraiture but in new ways. In this way, I argue that painting photographs were not just a new hybrid form of imagery but also set firmly within the trajectory of Indian painting, that court artists used photography and a phpotographic aesthetic as new tools, and that photography did not spell the end of Indian painting, as believe by some scholars, but rather another point in its continued evolution.
In 1914, Canada founded its monument to world culture, the Royal Ontario Museum, in which artwork... more In 1914, Canada founded its monument to world culture, the Royal Ontario Museum, in which artworks from India formed a part of its growing Asian collections. That same year a ship full of people from the British colony of India were turned away at Vancouver’s port. “We’ll take your artifacts but not your people”: a hundred years ago, this seemed to be the message that went out across the Dominion of Canada. In 2014, on their centennial anniversaries, there have been many events celebrating the museum and commemorating what has been termed “the Komagata Maru incident.” On the one hand, the passage of time traces how far Canada has come in embracing its multicultural population as a core of its national identity. On the other hand, that same passage of time demonstrates how fraught with tension this sense of nationalism continues to be.
In Julie Codell, ed. Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars, 1877-1911. New Delhi and Ahmedabad: Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin, pp. 136-155, 2012
This essay explores the limits of photography—both in an expansive and contractive sense— that is... more This essay explores the limits of photography—both in an expansive and contractive sense— that is, the medium’s frontiers and its limitations. It argues that the Raja Deen Dayal & Sons' Coronation Album serves as a counternarrative to the spectacle of imperial conquest by literally and metaphorically centering the Nizam’s body in specific photographs as well as in the sequence of images. In this way, the album’s construction pushes the boundaries of the medium as something more than simply a chronicler of the durbar’s events. At the same time, it argues that the commercial failure of the album, which contributed to the decline of the venerable studio, points to a shift in ocular epistemology at the turn of the century, when it seemed the photographic medium was no longer sufficient to address the representational problems or desires of a new era.
This article—formatted as a conversation between two curators—concerns affect photography and mus... more This article—formatted as a conversation between two curators—concerns affect photography and museum collections. Sparked by studio portraiture in the Jhabvala Collection of South Asian Photography in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, the authors explore the concept of “cumulative affect” and reflect on the possibilities of applying current scholarship on affect to museum collections. They argue that it is the conventions in a genre like studio portrait photography, and its repetitive nature, which define its affective force. The idea of “cumulative affect” is in direct contrast with claims that have been made about other kinds of photographs, such as images of violence, which argue that overexposure decreases the impact of such images leading to a desensitized and disaffected viewer.
In Satadru Sen and James Mills, eds., Confronting the Body: The Experience of Physicality in Modern South Asia. London: Anthem Press, pp. 118-134., 2004
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, concern about the declining state of Indian arts re... more In the latter half of the nineteenth century, concern about the declining state of Indian arts resulted in a number of debates around art education. These debates became articulated, in large part, around the figure of the native craftsman. Visual representations of the native craftsman proliferated featuring the body of the native craftsman in the process of producing his craft. This essay will explore the production of these images at the intersection of art education and colonialism. The "native" craftsman figure was constructed within colonial discourse as both the hope of Indian art's revival and as the source of its corruption. Images of the body at work came to symbolize this contradiction and became the standard representational mode for the Indian craftsman.
In Julie Codell, ed. Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press. London: Associated University Presses, pp. 29-44., 2003
Niharika Dinkar’s Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India is a dense, ri... more Niharika Dinkar’s Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India is a dense, rich, surprising, creative, mostly non-linear journey across the long nineteenth century exploring Britain’s encounter with India and India’s reaction to that encounter. The book’s basic premise is that light functioned as a central modality enabling and mediating that interaction. The larger goal here is to place empire at the center of histories of vision.
The Waterhouse Albums tells the story of a young British soldier in India at the nexus of certain... more The Waterhouse Albums tells the story of a young British soldier in India at the nexus of certain historical circumstances in the second half of the nineteenth century that facilitated his training in photography and propelled him toward major advancements in photochemistry and photomechanical reproduction. The life and work of this photographer and scientist, James Waterhouse (1842-1921), is an example of how the colonial context provided a stage as well as the impetus for the development of technologies that came to be markers of modernity for much of the European world. Despite the accolades received during his lifetime, Waterhouse has been largely overlooked by modern-day historians. This publication goes a long way in correcting this omission and makes a convincing argument about James Waterhouse’s central position in the long history of photography.
Christopher Pinney’s ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India trac... more Christopher Pinney’s ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India traces the development of prints, mostly chromolithographs, from the late 1870s onward. Specifically, he focuses on the intersection of printed images and political struggles from the colonial period to present-day India. Chromolithographs, complex color images printed from multiple stone blocks, developed from the basic lithographic technique invented by Alois Senefelder in Munich in 1798 and first used in India in 1820. Far from a Gutenberg galaxy, South Asia is a region where the visual image has played a powerful role and where the written word has had limited impact in an environment marked by oral tradition and multiple languages. It is for this reason that this book has significance beyond a history of visual practice. One of the central arguments is that chromolithographs were not simply a reflection of things happening elsewhere or “illustrations of some other force,” but rather “were an integral element of history in the making” (8). In this way, Pinney presents a profoundly convincing and extremely nuanced case for visual culture as a key element in considering politics and religion in modern India.
PhD thesis, Art History, University of Minnesota, 2001
This dissertation examines the institution, ideology and practice of art education in South Asia ... more This dissertation examines the institution, ideology and practice of art education in South Asia during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In particular, if focuses on the Madras School of Arts, the earliest of the surviving colonial art schools. Established in 1850 by Resident Surgeon, Dr. Alexander Hunter, the Madras School of Art functioned as a mediator of ideas about art and aesthetics between England and other art schools in the Indian colony. It also served as a site for the production of a new kind of visual culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this context, this thesis also explores the intersection of art schools, museums, and annual exhibitions as an "arena of art education" and the figure of the "craftsman at work."
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Books by Deepali Dewan
Appendix A: Timeline
Appendix B: Dating
Appendix C: Signatures and Wet stamps
Salemamad Khatri, and the embroidery collective Qasab Kutch Craftswomen Producer Co. Ltd. The central artwork, Mobile Palace, features layered fabric lengths of machine-made cloth and draws inspiration from eighteenth-century tents used in South Asian and Islamic worlds as mobile palaces, Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture in India, and cotton’s history in India’s anti-colonial resistance. These elements come together in a
body of work that re-imagines the relationship between motif, pattern, and ornament. The four essays in the book explore Tamhane’s larger practice of mark-making as an act of resistance.
Articles by Deepali Dewan
a term invented in the post-WWII era in the US when academic and political forces aligned to define an area-studies model of understanding the world. I acknowledge that the use of the term ‘South Asia’ has political efficacy for diasporic communities. But what is lost?
Reviews by Deepali Dewan
Appendix A: Timeline
Appendix B: Dating
Appendix C: Signatures and Wet stamps
Salemamad Khatri, and the embroidery collective Qasab Kutch Craftswomen Producer Co. Ltd. The central artwork, Mobile Palace, features layered fabric lengths of machine-made cloth and draws inspiration from eighteenth-century tents used in South Asian and Islamic worlds as mobile palaces, Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture in India, and cotton’s history in India’s anti-colonial resistance. These elements come together in a
body of work that re-imagines the relationship between motif, pattern, and ornament. The four essays in the book explore Tamhane’s larger practice of mark-making as an act of resistance.
a term invented in the post-WWII era in the US when academic and political forces aligned to define an area-studies model of understanding the world. I acknowledge that the use of the term ‘South Asia’ has political efficacy for diasporic communities. But what is lost?