Visions of India | Interpretive texts

Indu Antony

by Yask Desai

The ubiquitous ‘uncle’ is a term that all of us are expected to use as Indians when we address a male from the generation above us, either family, family friend or indeed a complete stranger that happens to be significantly older than us.

Mitter Bedi

by Stella Loftus-Hills

Taken from below, and looking up towards the sky, this black-and-white photograph shows an industrial pipe snaking its way through the picture plane and around the top of a factory chimney, which forms a vertical line within the lower half of the composition.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

by Kirsty Grant

With right hands raised high above tilted heads, and bodies leaning in the same direction, the subjects of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph are like dancers performing a carefully choreographed routine.

Lala Deen Dayal

by Dr Sushma Griffin

Although considered one of the most influential Indian photographers in the global history of nineteenth-century photography, Lala Deen Dayal’s portraiture practice is surprisingly underexamined, receiving only cursory acknowledgment and little sustained attention.

William Johnson

by Gael Newton AM

British civil servant, William Johnson arrived in Bombay in 1848 and took an early interest in daguerreotype then wet-collodion photography on paper.

Anne Palakunnathu Matthew

by Yask Desai

This series of self-portraits entitled An Indian from India, references orientalist photographic practice with both wit and a wrath.

Wilson and Co.

by Gael Newton AM

It is highly unlikely that the founders and operators of Wilson Studios, operational in Bombay from c. 1920–40, looked back to William Johnson’s clever Bombay montages of the 1850s, but their distinctive portraits share the same fusion of the real and the fantastical.

Anoli Perera

by Yask Desai

Hair in South Asia has long been employed by the patriarchy as a means of oppression.

Sawai Ram Singh II, Maharaja of Jaipur

by Wendy Garden

Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II was the ruler of the princely state of Jaipur from 1852 to 1880.

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Visions of India: from the colonial to the contemporary