The Imperial Aesthetic: Photography, Samuel Bourne and the Indian Peoples in the Post-Mutiny Era

Samuel Bourne (1834-1912) is one of the best well-known Victorian English commercial photographers to have worked in British India, where he sojourned from 1863 to 1870. Soon after his arrival he started a business with the experienced photographer Charles Shepherd. Within a few years, the firm Bourne & Shepherd became recognised as being a directing influence over British-Indian photography. Their work provides a valuable tool to evaluate the Victorian representations of India, the setting of a colonial mind. The Imperial Aesthetic: Photography, Samuel Bourne and the Indian Peoples in the Post-Mutiny Era focuses on Bourne's commercial and artistic photographs of the Indian population, produced during successive field trips he undertook in the 1860s and the portraits taken by his firm until Shepherd's departure at the end of the 1870s. It engages with the relationship between colonial ethnography and photography, and reflects on the balance between aesthetic, cultural and political considerations in the aftermath of the 'Mutiny'.