Abstract
This article explores the diffusion and productions of commercial studio photography in South India (Tamil Nadu) from the time the first Indian-run studios opened in the 1880s up to the demise of analog photography—and thereby of many family-run studios—a century later. The particular focus of the article is on research carried out to constitute the stars.archive (Studies in Tamil Studio Archives and Society), the first digital archive of Tamil studio photography, which includes around forty-two thousand photographic images digitized inside studios, private homes, and secondhand shops all over Tamil Nadu. Through examination of the archive, the article suggests that a history of photography in this region needs to attend more closely to the specificities of appropriation of the photographic apparatus and its social uses by sourcing empirical data outside institutional archives. A closer examination of the content of the stars.archive reveals the diversification over time of the social uses of studio photography, far beyond the ubiquitous “studio portrait.”
This article sketches out several untraveled roads and hidden alleyways of a vivid chapter of the world history of photography, that of Tamil studio photography. The latent archive of a century of Tamil studio photography can be partly revealed from the content of forlorn trunks and boxes, stalls displaying secondhand goods, and the memories of those who worked in studio darkrooms until the advent of color photography and mechanized processing in the 1980s followed shortly thereafter by the digital revolution. Until digital media brought on the death of the darkroom, the restricted access to photographic apparatus meant that for the majority of the Tamil population, photo studios were the sole purveyors of photography. The democratization of photography in the early twentieth century in Europe, which materialized with the arrival on the market of all-in-one, smaller, family-friendly cameras such as the Kodak Brownie, did not occur in this region of the world as these contraptions did not reach the mainstream Indian market.1 From the 1880s, when the first Indian-run photo studios opened in Tamil Nadu (then the Madras Presidency under British rule), until their demise one hundred years later, they constituted, according to Sudhir Mahadevan, “the dominant institution in popular photography”2 in India.
When I began researching Tamil studio photography several years ago, I did so without any programmatic intentions such as decolonizing its archives or addressing subaltern photography. Quite simply I was setting out in search of the broad contours of the history of its practitioners. I was at the time—and still am—mostly working far from the field of visual anthropology, as the core of my ethnographical research over the last twenty years in villages of south central Tamil Nadu is concerned with issues of caste and legal culture. The purpose of this article is to share empirical data and insights I gathered while carrying out fieldwork to build the stars.archive, in the hope that this archive in the making will foster future research both inside and outside the frame of studio photographs. I will begin by taking a small detour into the inception of what has become the stars.archive project before suggesting that we ought to distinguish three strands of the history of photography in this region. I will then walk through the stars.archive, which comprises some forty-two thousand digitized prints and negatives, to draw a preliminary taxonomy of the subject of studio photography in Tamil Nadu.
From the Sunday Market to the British Library
In Madurai some twenty years ago, there were not many distractions available for a PhD student looking for a break from fieldwork in the rural stretches surrounding this sacred Tamil city.3 I did eventually find a place to indulge my predilection for flea markets and secondhand goods in the narrow lanes of Thilagar Thidal Cantai, better known as the ñāyiṟṟukkiḻamai cantai (Sunday market). The merchandise spilling out of its numerous stalls consisted mainly of all manner of secondhand goods (including oily bicycle chains, rusted water pumps, sheets of tarpaulin, gutted radios, and more) as well as live poultry, such as chicks dyed in striking pinks, greens, and blues. Toward the back of the covered market, two stalls displayed dismantled wooden frames alongside rectangular sheets of glass and rusty metal. Prior to their disarticulation by the stall owner, these frames contained family studio portraits, which were stacked haphazardly on the ground (fig. 1).
These portraits were sold to recyclers for a handful of rupees, a little more if the frame was carved or gilded. However, the bread and butter of these secondhand dealers was not the printed image but its container: the wood, glass, and metal used to build the frame. Nevertheless, after the frames were dismantled, the photographs were not taken back by the original owners and stored away in the family's alamāri (cupboard) or pasted unframed next to their cāmi paṭam (printed images of deities). Instead they remained in the stall, collecting dust.
Over the course of my visits to the ñāyiṟṟukkiḻamai cantai, I bought one, then two, then ten and more of these discarded photographs. Several years after I completed my PhD, I returned to live in Tamil Nadu, and I began to wonder whether these studio portraits would be, to invoke Claude Lévi-Strauss, “good to think.” As I was largely unfamiliar with South Asian visual anthropology, I searched the available literature on the history of photography in India for studies to understand the context of production of the commercial studio portraits in this region and clues to understand their modes of consumption over time. Though the visual turn in Indian social sciences is a little over three decades old, I found no publications on the topic of commercial photography in this region and came to realize that this could in part be explained by the fact that there was no publicly accessible archive dedicated to studio photography in South India.
As time went by, I increasingly felt an urgent need to constitute a witness-archive to bear testimony to the productions of Tamil photo studios, as many of the photographs I saw were displaying signs of severe deterioration because of their age and the detrimental effects of South India's year-round humidity.4 Subsequently K. Ramesh Kumar of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) and I secured funding from the Endangered Archives Programme (British Library, Arcadia) and recruited two team members. Together we carried out intensive fieldwork over twelve months, from 2015 to 2016, at more than one hundred studios in fourteen towns in Tamil Nadu.5
Our survey revealed the irreversible destruction of studio archives over the years. Numerous interviews carried out in studios as well as with the descendants of studio photographers brought to light two reasons that studio archives, specifically glass-plate negatives and film negatives, were destroyed. On the one hand, negatives were gradually sold during the studio's lifetime to itinerant silver extractors, and on the other hand, once the studio has closed down, many families had neither the interest nor the space to conserve them. The fieldwork also brought to light the fact that many studios—which were the sole providers of photography from 1880 to 1980—did not survive several successive technological developments, including the advent of mechanized processing and printing, the arrival of color film, and the digital revolution. On the heels of these developments, a large number of photo studios, some of which had run continuously over as many as five generations, closed down permanently. The conclusion of our yearlong survey was not an optimistic one. Our fieldwork revealed that whole pieces of the history of Tamil studio photography will soon be irreversibly lost.
It was then that I initiated an informal research collective named Studies in Tamil Studio Archives and Society (STARS) and subsequently renamed stars.archive, which includes photographers, anthropologists, historians, conservation experts, and curators.6 With further funding from the Endangered Archives Programme (2017–19), we proceeded in the building of two archives: a small physical archive composed essentially of discarded prints bought in secondhand markets with funding from the IFP and a much larger digital archive of negatives on glass and film. To date stars.archive contains a physical archive of 5,300 studio prints hosted by the IFP and a digital archive of 37,000 glass plates, soft negatives, and studio prints consisting of studio archives, family collections, private collections, and prints held by antique and secondhand dealers who accepted the on-site digitization of their images.7 Institutionally speaking, the short history of the stars.archive is not bereft of the specter of colonialism: most of the funding for the archive came from the British Library. This colonial history is also invoked through the involvement of the IFP, a research institution established in 1955 under the terms of the Treaty of Cession of French Territories in India. Both institutions hold a copy of the work undertaken by the stars.archive for consultation by researchers, students, and curators. Another copy will be deposited in Chennai (the capital of Tamil Nadu) in the Roja Muthiah Research Library to increase access. It is important to underline that the physical images and their copyrights remain the property of their owners, and not a single negative or print was purchased from studios or families, even when it was proposed to us by the owners. Doing so would result in orphaned images, which we wanted to prevent. The physical collection constituted by the IFP comprises only images purchased from secondhand dealers and from private donations.
The ambition of stars.archive is to make these images available to researchers, students, and exhibition curators in order to contribute to creating awareness of the importance of the conservation of Tamil photographic heritage and to encourage and facilitate investigations into its rich history. The stars.archive is yet to be fully available online, and painstaking (and until now unfunded) work is underway to build comprehensive metadata in order to make the archive searchable online from an independent website (www.starsarchive.net). However, research, both published and unpublished, by students and scholars is already underway.8
Three Histories of Photography
I entered the field of Tamil studio photography with next to no visual-culture background and a very faint idea of the history of photography. Though my readings on the literature on photography in South Asia were fascinating and taught me a lot, three blind spots remain unresearched. First, concerning the colonial period, commercial photo studios located outside of the metropolises of Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi constitute barely a footnote in the research that has been carried out. Further, studies of photography produced more specifically in South India at that time revolve around two towering figures of the early history of photography: Captain Linnaeus Tripe (1822–1902), who in 1857–62 served as official photographer to the government of Madras; and the famed Raja Lala Deen Dayal (1844–1905), who in addition to his studio work was appointed official photographer to the Nizam of Hyderabad as well as to several British dignitaries, including the Viceroy of India and Queen Victoria. Second, the lacuna concerning the study of commercial studio photography in South India carries over to the research on the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed investigations such as that carried out by Chris Pinney in a studio in Central India (Madhya Pradesh)9 have yet to be produced in Tamil Nadu or in the other southern states (Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka). Third and finally, the arrival and diffusion of mechanically reproduced images in colonial spaces, as they relate to analog photographs and to illustrated magazines, have yet to constitute a comparative field of research despite its importance to building a connected world history of photography.
While carrying out fieldwork on studio photography in Tamil Nadu, I came to realize that it is necessary to distinguish and document three different strands of the history of analog photography in this region: (1) a history of photography in India, (2) a history of Indian photography, and (3) an Indian history of photography. These three strands of history are not as entangled as the somewhat confusing labels suggest. Nor do they, taken together, reflect a search for what could be specifically Indic in photography and ways of seeing images, as some have more or less successfully explored.10 Instead they point to three complementary paths of investigation requiring empirical data of different sorts and varying methods of analysis. As my personal research lies in this third strand (an Indian history of photography), in what follows I provide a more limited overview of the first two.
A History of Photography in India
Study of the history of photography in India has largely, if not completely, overshadowed the history of Indian photography and the Indian history of photography. There is a simple and logical explanation to this state of the field. A prerequisite to study photography (in India) is access to photographs. There must be public archives or private collections that can be consulted. The vast majority of literature available on the history of photography in India is thus dependent on what has been deemed worthy of commissioning, collecting, preserving, and repatriating to England. This assessment is often based on what is judged beautiful and/or valuable enough to be purchased by public museums, private institutions, and professional collectors. As Elizabeth Edwards states so clearly: “All histories are texted through the patterns, values, ideologies and practices of their collection, survival and projection into the future as legitimate objects of study. History of photographs is no different in that register.”11 Given the genre of the photographs available in renowned collections and archives, the study of the history of photography in India has largely focused on two fields: colonial photography and princely photography. Natural resources, archaeological sites, and historical monuments, as well as socio-racial subjects, were the prime targets of the colonial gaze. Consequently most studies focus on photography as a practice of power and control by colonial administrations over the land and its inhabitants.12 Another set of important studies details how Indian elites, namely the numerous royal families, rapidly embraced this new form of representation. The photographs produced in this context served as sources for studies on the princely courts, the photographic staging of authority, and their function in the patronage of the arts and techniques.13 Many, if not most, publications reflect the contents of the rich collections of the India Office Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Alkazi Foundation, the Ehrenfeld Collection, and others. It is from these archives, which were largely shaped by specific institutional and intellectual constraints and concerns, that the images for the major exhibitions on photography in India are generally borrowed. These archives have also been the focus of exhibition catalogs, which constitute a significant part of the literature on the subject of photography in India. As Sophie Gordon puts it,
The history of photography in India has, over the last quarter of a century, been told largely from the perspective of a handful of colonial collections. . . . Publications by British Library curators . . . have been influential in establishing significant photographers and events, while emphasizing the importance of British documentary work. This colonial dominance is inevitable, for although the photographs in the India Office Collection combine to create an extraordinary collection of around 250,000 items containing the work of hundreds of photographers, it represents what successive colonial administrators believed to be worth collecting and preserving, rather than being truly representative of photography in India.14
However prominent the history of photography in India has been until now, there remains a dearth of research on the Madras Presidency, that is, the colonial and princely photography in South India. Despite pioneering work by G. Thomas on the early decades of photography and the Madras Photographic Society, the publications concerning Linnaeus Tripe's photographic campaigns across South India and Burma, and a recent study by Deepali Dewan on photography in the Madras School of Arts between 1850s and 1870s, numerous aspects of photography in the Madras Presidency remain in the shadows.15 Similarly photography of the royal families in the Tamil region is a largely unexplored topic. However, fieldwork among the Thondaimans of Pudukottai as well as several smaller royalties in Kongu Nadu has demonstrated their early participation not only in the consumption but also the production of photography.16
A History of Indian Photography (Inside the Frame)
Studying the production of studio photography outside its elite consumption is not a straightforward task given its rare occurrence or even absence in open-access collections and institutional archives. However, it is possible to surmise that over a century several million photographs were produced outside the restricted circles of colonial institutions and Indian courts. Indeed, and in contrast to what occurred in some other colonial spaces,17 Indian colonial subjects very quickly embraced the medium and began opening studios, first in the presidencies' capitals (Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta) and then, starting in the 1880s, in smaller towns and cities. Further, unlike what happened in Europe, the photo studio remained for more than a century the only access to photography for the vast majority of people all over the subcontinent. However, photographs by modest commercial photo studios have not made their way in large numbers into most archives, and consequently only a handful of researchers has been able to devote in-depth studies on the subject. These photographs have not reached the status of collectibles. They are not rare and therefore have remained a footnote in the history of photography in India (fig. 2). However, they constitute what I consider to be the majority photography in India. I invoke the notion of majority photography by adapting the concept of the “majority world” developed by Shahidul Alam, a Bangladeshi photojournalist and activist. In an effort to reject ranked global categories, Alam argues that if the majority of the world population lives in the colonized and exploited lands of the Global South, they should be labeled not the third world but the Majority World.18
This majority photography consists of invisible, institutionally nonexistent collections of marginal and noncollectible (or at least possessing no market value) photographs produced by commercial photo studios not catering to elite clientele. The research in this field to date relies on the empirical data that historians and anthropologists have located during their own fieldwork and therefore has largely focused on the mid-twentieth century. Such studies include landmark research by the anthropologist Chris Pinney in Madhya Pradesh and his subsequent collaboration with Suresh Punjabi, a studio photographer from Nagda; the detailed attention of Malavika Karlekar to the consumption of photographs in Bengal; and a few other fruitful but isolated inroads into the study of this majority photography.19 However, none of these studies address the same issues with respect to photography in Tamil Nadu. To put things into geographical perspective: two thousand kilometers separate Nagda and the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and approximately the same between Kolkata and Madurai—roughly the same distance between Barcelona and Copenhagen. The writing of a comparative history of Indian photography with its regional specificities will be extremely difficult until further endeavors to safeguard the photographic heritage in each region are carried out and field research is undertaken.20
The stars.archive is a modest contribution in this direction, as it aims to provide researchers working on the photographic history in Tamil Nadu with a starting point or point of comparison regarding what went on inside the frame. In this vein the final section of this article describes in broad strokes what appears on the surface of the images produced in Tamil photo studios. By offering a taxonomy of the social uses of studio photography, I propose directions for using the stars.archive as a stepping stone for future research.
An Indian History of Photography (Outside the Frame)
Behind the silver halides that reveal to the naked eye who and what was displayed in front of the camera's lens in Tamil studios lies a century of complex and diverse mercantile strategies, commercial competitions, technical constraints, artistic innovations, changing modes of consumption, and evolving networks of circulations of photographic goods and prints. To attend to the Indian history of photography, we need to heed the call of Sudhir Mahadevan to reconceptualize what constitutes its archives and to engage in the study of the material, consumer, and retail cultures of photography.21 I will sketch out in this section some significant traits of this history in the context of the Madras Presidency (up to the Independence of India in 1947) and in the state of Tamil Nadu, where the stars.archive project is carried out.
To trace the beginnings of photography as a commercial enterprise in South India, one needs to return to the colonial archive. As pointed out by Mahadevan, the first fifteen years (from 1840 until the mid-1850s) appear to be a relatively fallow period. In all likelihood it took at least another decade for the photographic print to acquire the status of a marketable commodity through the production and consumption of photographic portraits for private use. Indeed during the early decades of Indian photography, the prohibitive costs of acquiring equipment, which entered South India through the port of Madras (now Chennai), coupled with the intense training necessary to use what was then a complex apparatus, made photography accessible exclusively to the British. Not surprisingly it was an enterprise largely reserved for the East India Company up to 1857 and, following this period, the colonial administration.
A valuable source of information on the expansion of commercial photography during the colonial period are the yearly directories that were published in the three presidencies.22 The directory for the Madras Presidency, which was published under different titles and by different publishers from 1799 up to 1936, offers numerous clues on the changing status of photography over nearly seven decades and the gradual but steady penetration of the field by Indian practitioners.23
The trade list for Madras in the 1857 almanac lists a category “Portrait Painters,” with only three practitioners. The name of one, F. J. Jupe, could be British, and the two others, named Fonceca Sr. and Fonceca Jr., are Portuguese. In the following decades, competition for a share of the studio photography market in the capital and the prominent cities of the Madras Presidency took place not between the British and the Indians but rather among an array of European nationalities (including German, Italian, and Portuguese) and Indians. This minute entry in the 1857 almanac also speaks to the common imbrication of trade and skills between painters and photographers with respect to the production of portraiture: F. J. Jupe appears in the almanac over the course of the next twenty years as the owner of the photography studio Jupe and Co. In 1858, just a year later, the Madras Almanac listed four photographers in Madras. Significantly, half of them are Indians (Davasigawmoney and Maselamoney).
In the earliest almanac I was able to consult in its entirety, from 1866, the commercial expansion of photography had not yet begun. I learned only of a photographic department having been opened within the School of Industrial Arts (Madras) and of the cost of importing nonsilvered glass plates. Less than a decade later, the 1874 edition of the Madras Almanac indicates the emergence of photography as a professional trade and photographs as consumer goods in circulation within the empire, subject to postal and sea customs rules. More important, Indian photographers had entered discreetly but surely in the commercial scene. Of the four photographers registered in the capital of the presidency in 1866, two are Indian. Their studios are located close to the seat of colonial power (Fort Saint Georges) and on what were already lively commercial thoroughfares (Broadway and Mount Road). By then photo studios had spread outward from the capital, not only to the refreshing hill station of Ottacamund, in present-day Tamil Nadu, which attracted the British during the hot season, but also to the important cities of the presidency, located in present-day Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. What the colonial sources do not reveal is that the commercial photo studios found their way into the bazaars of medium-sized towns by the late 1870s—without, however, being registered in the yearly trade lists. To take only one example, Nalla Pillai Studio (fig. 3), which opened in the Kumbakonam in 1878 and is still running today, never found its way in the commercial listings over the next decades of its existence.
These yearly commercial listings nonetheless remain a useful, although quite fragmentary, source of information to sketch out broad transformations in the field. The Madras Almanac for 1924 attests to significant expansion of photography at several levels, including commerce of its materials, development of studios outside of the capital, and an increasing, sharp predominance of Indian photographers over European photographers. Further, commercial advertisements, which gradually found their way into the pages of the Madras Almanac, offer a glimpse of the emerging competition between European and Indian photographers. The first two advertisements (starting from the left) in figures 4a and 4b date from 1905 and clearly display the competition between European studio photographers and Indian studio photographers, with the former highlighting that the photographs are taken by Europeans, suggesting superior mastery of the photographic apparatus, and the latter trumpeting its low prices. Both specify their capacity as photographers of children: the Indian-run studio, R.Venkiah, by way of a photograph of a young boy and the European (the Italian-run Del Tufo and Company) with a bold, underlined statement. The Indian studio is much more effusive about its technical and artistic skills, whereas its European counterpart promotes the frequent renewal of its photographic materials.
All Indian studios, including those in Tamil Nadu, relied on the importation of photographic equipment, from the arrival on the first cameras in 1840 up to the demise of darkrooms in the 1980s. The increased demand for photographic equipment points to the spread of the consumption of photography by the Tamil middle classes. This increased demand is evident in the transformation of retail imports. Early on general merchants imported all kinds of goods. Later, companies that specialized exclusively in photographic equipment emerged. However, it is not yet clear whether these local companies managed importation themselves, purchased bulk goods, or dealt with other companies abroad. The third advertisement, also for R. Venkiah but published a quarter of a century later, illustrates a definite shift in marketing (fig. 4c). Gone is the sample photograph, list of skills, and “low class prices.” Instead the advertisement states the studio's actual prices (from 100 to 1000 rupees), displays a prestigious list of dignitaries who have commissioned portraits, and specifies that the studio is “modern.”
However, as mentioned above, the data contained by the Madras almanacs reflects only a part of the picture of the vibrant life of studio photography.24 Indeed far more studios opened from the 1890s onward than are recorded in the trade lists of the almanacs, as we were able to assess during the yearlong survey carried out in fourteen localities in Tamil Nadu among a hundred or so studios. Our interviews revealed that, following its introduction, studio photography became a family profession. Studios were thus kept from father to son, decade after decade. Most of them remained modest local enterprises, though a handful of studios prospered and opened branches in several cities. By working with the descendants of the founders of photo studios who, more often than not, have been studio photographers themselves, we have begun to open a comprehensive window onto an Indian—or rather a Tamil—history of studio photography.
This research constitutes a field of “urgent ethnography,”25 as this history has been transmitted orally across the different generations who worked in darkrooms together. This transmission is steadily fading along with the last generation of men who worked with their fathers and uncles to shoot, manually process, and print analog photos; to build, repair, resell, and order cameras; to order, stock, and process chemicals, negatives, and printing papers; to work with paint, wood, glass, and metal artisans to produce finished products; to set up and participate in professional studio photographers' associations at the level of the locality, the district, and the state; and to recycle every bit of silver, scraping the negatives bare of their images. The men who hold this knowledge and the memory of the practices that preceded them are well into their sixties.
The last generation of studio photographers to have worked in analog learned photography from a fairly young age by helping with a family-run studio. Their fathers, grandfathers, and other forefathers did the same. Nonfamily employees were brought in and trained, but this practice drew from a closed network of individuals belonging to the same caste as the founding family. After years of learning the skill and practicing the trade, a family member or fellow caste member with the necessary financial means could go off to open his own studio in the same locality or settle in another town to expand the original family business. For instance, in present-day Karaikudi it is possible, through oral history, to trace the progressive opening of four studios through cooperation along a network of kin and caste on the one hand and on the other the antagonism and competition that existed with another studio whose owners did not belong to the same caste.26 These five studios (three of which are still in operation) were located on the same commercial artery.
The earliest formal professional organization I have been able to trace dates back to the first decade after the independence of India. Organized specifically by and for professional photographers, the South Indian Photographic and Allied Trades Association (SIPATA) began in 1958 and managed the distribution of film, paper, and cameras in not only Tamil Nadu but also Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Pondicherry. The ledgers and catalogs of SIPATA would have constituted a formidable source of data to study the expansion and economy of studio photography throughout South India over some forty years. Unfortunately, its office and archive in Chennai burned down several years prior to my research. The investigation was further hindered as information concerning SIPATA was not easy to elicit from studio photographers as many held the organization, of which they were captive to carry out their photographic business, in contempt. It appears that the distribution of film was sometimes unequally provided to studios. Nonetheless membership to SIPATA became a prerequisite to practice photography commercially, and nearly all studios visited could, if willing, dig up an old membership card (fig. 5).
Indeed not only were the importation taxes of photographic equipment and materials coming in from countries such as Germany and Japan very high but also it appears that the imported material was insufficient in quantity to satisfy the needs of the photo studios of South India. The owner of Rasi Studio in Madurai described his SIPATA card as just like a “ration card, not for food but for photography”; the per-studio quota system, devised to control distribution, left studios wanting. SIPATA's far-reaching control was portrayed by some as nefarious since it was literally impossible to open a studio without being a member.
For those with sufficient means, access to photographic goods, namely cameras and camera parts, was also possible through the black market known as the “Burma bazaar” with its reputation for trading in foreign commodities and smuggled goods.27 The pressing demand for photographic film and paper was somewhat alleviated and their cost reduced with the opening of the Hindustan Photo Film factory in 1967, attended in person by no less than the prime minister of India of the time, Indira Gandhi. Though the factory was located in a hill station of Tamil Nadu, its products were distributed all over India.
The scarcity and prohibitive costs of photographic equipment help explain the dominance of studios in the production of photographs, as most middle-class families could neither afford nor access a camera, unless traveling abroad, and it also shaped photographic practices inside the studios. Indeed a significant trait of the Tamil (and more generally Indian) history of studio photography is the great endurance of certain materials, processes, and devices that were long ago replaced in other parts of the world (fig. 6). The most striking illustration found in the personal archives of the studios researched by stars.archive is the common use of photographic chambers and glass plates, alongside more recent equipment, until the arrival of color photography in the 1980s.
Reconceptualizing what constitutes the archive of the Tamil history of photography should also lead us outside the studio to follow the trail of the printed images into households and shops. In present-day Tamil Nadu studio portraits are omnipresent, both in the private sphere of the household and in a large number of public places. Indeed in virtually every home, shop, office, and government building in Tamil Nadu, one or several portraits of individuals, alive and deceased, are displayed. They may be family, founding members, benefactors, and the like. These portraits are often found garlanded, with kumkum and sandalwood paste applied on the forehead of deceased individuals;28 it is common for āratti to be performed daily.29 Although one can easily observe the use of portraits as hybrid photo-objects subject to domestic rituals, their display mingled with cāmi paṭam (prints of deities), political figures, and regional movie stars, these topics have not yet been fully explored. An extended study of the consumer culture of studio photography is as urgent as the one carried out inside the studios: the modes of consumption of photography were radically altered three decades ago with the digital revolution, and the progressive nuclearization of the family structure and increased geographical mobility have left an uncountable number of family portraits orphaned in secondhand markets and bazaars.
The Seven Lives of Studio Photography
Though access to the photographic apparatus remained the privilege of the elite and the bread and butter of studio photographers until the 1990s, the demand, use, function, and circulation of photography diversified throughout the period under study (1880–1980). Further investigation of the terms and conditions of this process of diversification is needed. A preliminary walk-through of the forty-two thousand images of stars.archive, despite the contingent nature of its constitution, offers some answers to the question of the uses of and demand for photography.
The images digitized in the project reveal that studios were commissioned for and engaged in at least seven genres of photographic activities: (1) private portraiture, (2) institutional portraiture, (3) life-cycle portraiture, (4) photojournalism, (5) state-sponsored photography, (6) forensic photography, and (7) candid photography. However, these photographic genres are not distributed evenly among the different collections that currently compose the stars.archive. Generally a studio's archive includes examples from three or four genres but sometimes no more than one. This does not necessarily reflect the actual scope of activities of the given photo studio and could be the result of decisions made by the studio owners or their descendants over time as to which negatives to preserve and which to discard.
Private Portraiture
Because I am interested primarily in the social and technical history of photography, I will limit my observations to the rich repertoire of technical manipulations used by Tamil photo studios to control their production costs, to rectify unsatisfactory shots, and to compete for clients in this niche market by proposing innovative photographic products despite the limited technical improvements available to them. Restricted access to the regular technical innovations in cameras had at least two effects on the production of a century of South Indian portraiture. For studios seemingly less inclined to innovation and creativity, there is a strong stability in the aesthetics of the portrait that makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish portraits shot fifty years apart. For other studios these constraints resulted in a proliferation of attempts, more or less successful, to propose to their clients new portraits. These portraits relied on frequent renewal of the painted backdrops and on manipulations of the images. Studios competed to provide clients with varied painted backdrops with themes ranging from luxurious home interiors to beachfronts, riversides, and mountain ranges. Catalogs of British-manufactured backdrops have been found in a few studios. Most studios, however, relied on local painters to execute backdrops on large pieces of canvas. Sets of accessories (such as costume jewelry, watches, pens to be fitted in men's breast pockets, reading glasses and sunglasses, western-style shirts, and more) were offered to clients and various stage props—potted plants, vases, books, newspapers, rugs, and so on—rearranged to vary the composition of each portrait.
Manual manipulations of portraits occurred at one or more of the five stages of production of the image: (1) at the moment of setting the scene, (2) at the moment of the shooting, (3) while developing the negative, (4) while processing the negative, and (5) when finalizing the print. The stars.archive includes examples of multiple exposures (economic double exposures, double- and triple-shot “scenes,” “fake twins” double shots), cameo shadow shots, dark hallows, light hallows, vignetting, penciling, scratching, pink wash, monochrome coloring, partial coloring, and total coloring. Space constraints prevent me from providing a comprehensive review of all the types of manipulation that the researchers have been able to identify, both by analyzing the images and through interviews with studio photographers. However, in what follows, I briefly illustrate two of them: multiple exposures and what is known as “pink wash.”
The use of multiple exposures—a photographic technique that combines several different images into a single image—is abundant in the archives of Tamil studios (figs. 7, 8, and 9). We can distinguish between those only visible on the negative and those intended to be visible on the final print. Many studios chose, when possible, to save on the costs of negatives and use them twice—that is, to use the double exposure process not for aesthetic purposes, as is often the case, but simply for economic ones. These can be found both on glass plate and celluloid negatives. The use of the double exposure also served creative purposes such as the theme of “master and servant,” where the same sitter is photographed twice or to create an atmosphere less suggestive of the colonial setting.
Not all studios excelled at this delicate manipulation, and there were often debates during interviews in a given locality over whose ancestor was the first to invent or propose a new image, which was rapidly duplicated by local competing studios.
The practice of touching up negatives in order to improve the appearance of the sitter at the moment of printing was widespread. Facial features such as the eyes and mouth were made more pronounced with sharp penciling (a practice also applied on the print), and the skin tone (face, neck, arms, and hands) was made to appear lighter by the application of pink wash,” a diluted pink-colored tint. This manipulation, immediately detectable on negatives though less so on prints, was extremely common. It originated, according to the studio photographers interviewed, from the necessity to correct daylight portraits. The importance of daylight portraits to photographers' businesses is apparent from the architectural design of the older “modern” studio buildings still standing and sometimes still in use, which relied on sunlight several decades after the arrival of electricity—around the mid-1930s for the large towns and small hill stations favored by the British. Photographers adapted the roofs of their studios by removing tiles or adding skylights and selected precise locations outside the studio based on the angle of the sun at a given time in mornings and afternoons.30 The overhead sun created strong shadows under the nose and neck of the sitters that were considered aesthetically unpleasing. Even after the arrival of electricity, which allowed controlled lighting inside the studio, pink wash continued to be used extensively, not to correct inelegant shadows but to lighten skin tone on the face, neck, arms, and hands and sometimes the bare feet of the sitters (figs. 10, 11, and 12). As several photographers put it, they were doing Photoshop much before the invention of computers.31
Institutional Portraiture
It is not clear when precisely the custom of commissioning annual group portraits of members belonging to the same institutions came into being. The earliest images digitized by stars.archive are from the 1920s, and the practice steadily increased in popularity through the late 1940s. These group portraits are of governmental departments (electricity boards, water boards, etc.), the faculty and students of educational facilities (training institutes, specific departments within a university, etc.), and the staffs of large factories and smaller private companies (fig. 13). These images can provide fertile ground to investigate important subjects as they develop over time, such as the evolution of the projection of corporate and educational identities and the transformation of their gender dynamics.32 In addition, and as opposed to the other categories of photography found in stars.archive, these images, if they are not too severely damaged, always include the name of the institution, its location, the date the photo was shot, and, frequently, the occasion for which the studio was commissioned to take it.
These institutional portraits, always taken outdoors—with imposing wooden field cameras by most studios until the 1980s and in a number of instances on glass-plate negatives—were described as a source of intense competition between studios of the same locality. Consisting of a single shot of the group, the prints (often commissioned in the more expensive large formats) were ordered in multiple copies (to be gifted to some or all of those present in the group) and thereby constituted lucrative yearly contracts.
Life-Cycle Portraiture
The stars.archive provides fascinating visual resources for study of the interplay between life rituals and photography. A cursory glance through the archive makes apparent that the different ceremonies that punctuate South Indian life were not, in the first decades, a subject matter of studio photography, but photographs of these events came to be progressively and differently absorbed as objects of private consumption (fig. 14). In the largely Hindu landscape of South India, marked by the distinctive features of Dravidian kinship and alliance, the most significant life events are, for many castes and communities, the naming ceremony and the ear-boring ceremony (kātu kutal) during childhood; the coming-of-age ceremony for young girls (caṭaṅku); the various ceremonies surrounding marriage such as niccayam and kalyāṇam; the near-end of pregnancy ceremony (vaḷaikāppu); and finally the different ceremonies related to death.
The photographic testimonies to life ceremonies are visual postscripts to the actual rituals and often convey visually very little about the social semantics and religious content of the event. Indeed photographs of rituals in the making are practically completely absent until the 1970s, which stands in stark contrast with extremely detailed recording of actual wedding ceremonies nowadays both on photo and video.33 Further, all rituals have not historically been given the same visual attention. The ear-boring ceremony, for instance, is not subject to photography. Portraits marking the puberty ritual, which begins to proliferate in the late 1950s and early 1960s, share the same scenography as vaḷaikāppu portraits, which appear more steadily beginning in the 1970s. And one can clearly observe the evolution of alliance from matrimony to conjugality in wedding portraits: the earliest portraits display a group of kin surrounding the newlywed, and several decades later the wife and husband as a standalone object of photographic attention.
Postmortem photographic portraits appear to have been commissioned throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (fig. 15). The earliest samples held in the stars.archive follow closely the staging and aesthetics of Victorian postmortem photography. Photographed inside, the deceased, sitting in the case of adults, held in the case of children and babies, are posed as if alive. Numerous samples display a manual alteration of the subjects' eyes, with closed eyelids delicately scratched out and redrawn or painted open. The practice of prana pratishtha on postmortem portraits is found throughout the decades, even as the practice of the full body shot gave way to bust and head shots.34
In the last decades of studio photography, postmortem portraits also appear in front of village households and courtyards. In rural areas many economically challenged families were not able to commission studio portraits for lack of financial means and nearby photo studios. Upon someone's death, a family member would be sent to the nearest town with a studio to commission a first and final portrait of the deceased. These quick location assignments were often delegated to the studio's apprentice to hone his skills and were generally printed without any elaborate manipulations of the image.
Photojournalism
The exploration of studio archives has revealed that photojournalism figured among the commissions of studio photographers, who recorded political, commercial, institutional, and sporting events in the locality of their studios. There are fewer such negatives in stars.archive, however, and so it remains an unexplored chapter in the history of Indian studio photography. Many questions remain unanswered: Under what terms were the shots commissioned? Where there yearly contracts binding a studio with a newspaper? If contracts existed, were they for exclusive terms? Were prints of political and film celebrities subsequently sold in the studio? Clearly, from the archives, studios that were able to shoot celebrities used this as a marketing tool to attract clients.
State-Sponsored Photography
After the second half of the twentieth century, photo studios came to handle the gradually increasing demand for photo identification by the government. This state-sponsored photography became an important source of revenue for photo studios (fig. 16). Nowadays most photo studios that have survived rely on this source of income alongside photocopies and digital retouching of damaged prints. Most studios interviewed in this project recall a radical increase of state-sponsored photography when identity photos became mandatory for the ration cards that entitled families to subsidized food and fuel. This added significantly to the photo studio's income. Prior to this the demand for ID photos was mostly limited to the privileged few holding passports or special licenses, such as for firearms. The negatives of ID photos were carefully cataloged by each studio, allowing clients to return a month, a year, or even five years later to get a reprint. It is significant to note that the investigation, both archival and ethnographic, is so far silent regarding penitentiary photography, both before or after Independence.
Forensic Photography
A rather grisly discovery in a certain number of studio archives was the presence of forensic photography. These images, many of them extremely difficult to look at, were found exclusively inside photo studios—never in secondhand markets or private homes—and systematically on synthetic negatives rather than glass plates and prints. They are records of road accidents (bicycle, rickshaw, buses, cars), apparent suicides (hanging, drowning), and crimes. Generally three negatives cover the event, shot at three different angles.
Interviews conducted inside the studios reveal that the Tamil police commissioned the studios for their crime-scene photography, both in smaller towns as well as in the capital (Madras/Chennai). Whether this was the case prior to Independence is so far unclear, as no negatives attesting to this have been found, suggesting that the British administration relied on internally appointed photographers to carry out forensic photography. The studio photographers with whom forensic photography was discussed fall broadly into two categories, those who enjoyed the adrenaline surge brought on by the gruesome scenes and those who hated it. The most common reaction is the latter.
When the police came to a photographer's studio shop or private home, individuals, as interviewees attested, could not refuse to go with them. “Nobody should see what my father had to see,” one recalled. “It is terrible enough taking the photos, but then you have to see them again when you develop the negative, and again when you print the copies to give to the police, and then it is still not finished: people know you were there, you took photos which they can't see, so they ask you all the bad details. It is a nightmare.” From a commercial perspective, forensic photography is also variously received. Some studios in Chennai see the police as steady customers and therefore a regular source of income. The police set the price for the shooting, developing, and printing, however, not the studio, and all those interviewed claimed that the rate was significantly below regular prices for portrait photography.
The reliance by the police on commercial photo studios to document crimes, accidents, and suicides largely survived the arrival of digital photography. In North Chennai (Ennore), for instance, one studio photographer was still working on a weekly basis for the local police until 2013, even though the department was equipped with several digital cameras.
Candid Photography
The only uncommissioned photography found in studio archives that was not subject to commercial transaction is the private family photographs of the studio photographer, taken within the studio space, at home, or during outings. They deserve attention given the scarcity of candid photography for most middle-class families, who had limited access to personal cameras. These types of images offer rare insights into scenes of daily life and leisure of middle-class households. They were found in family albums and also mixed in with negatives of the studios' commissioned work, though none on glass-plate negatives. They are always small in format, suggesting that larger printing was reserved for the paying clients.
Is Tamil Studio Photography Good to Think?
It was very hot that day in Mylapore. We were sweaty, grimy, and tired after three days spent crouching over two metal boxes containing the remains of the photographic archive of Sathyam Studio (fig. 17). But we were also enthralled. From these two rusty boxes had emerged silver traces of a rich visual past going back to the 1930s, when the studio opened in Madras, and even further, to when the current owner's great-grandfather was working for the Nizam of Hyderabad as a state artist in the early 1900s. Over three days Vinnoli, Arun, and I had sorted through, cleaned, and digitized what remains of the daily work and labor of four generations of photographers: 498 photographs.
Balachandran Raju was sitting, as he did every day, at the front entrance of the forlorn studio watching the busy traffic of R. K. Mutt Road while his son, Anandh, handled the few customers that still come by for a passport-size photo or a photocopy. Balachandran Raju had a strong and peaceful presence. He still followed strictly his diet of one vegetarian meal a day and unfailingly came into the studio for several hours. Though his age sometimes played tricks with his short-term memory, I believe he enjoyed our inquisitive presence and awe as we unpacked the studio's time capsule. I sat next to him and asked if he would mind looking over the digitized negatives on my laptop and give me more contextual information on the images. We barely made it past ten or fifteen images when he turned his head away and shook his right hand in front of the blue screen, signaling me to stop. His eyes had welled up with tears, and he asked me, “Eppaṭi teriyum?” (How do you know?).
Since that hot day in Mylapore in June 2017, this short question of Balachandran Raju, who died on May 10, 2020, has resonated with me. He seemed to be expressing the pain of the passing of time, the distress of failing memory, the sorrow of viewing through silver halides the world as you knew it but which is no more. The feeling of loss and fast-disappearing worlds that I read in Balachandran Raju's question accompanied our work for three years throughout the studios we visited. The sense of urgency with which the stars.archive was created was instilled by the fact that too often we arrived too late—once, even, we were only one week too late, as the studio owner told us that all the negatives had been put in the kuppai (trash). We worked with an acute sense of the somewhat ironical conditions that made our research and this archive possible. On one hand, the technology that had put the darkroom out of business is the same one that has allowed us to salvage its archives. On the other, our implicit intention of decolonizing the Indian photographic archive was made possible by the institution holding the largest collection of South Asian colonial photography. Though we are thankful for the support of the British Library, the irony is not lost on us.
This short and fragmented incursion into a century of Tamil studio photography alerts us to the fact that the numerous specificities and modalities of the appropriation of the photographic apparatus and the social uses of photography in South Asia will only begin to become apparent once we decenter our gaze from the established archive and discard the paradigm of center versus periphery, which hinders our engagement with the world history of photography. In some regions, such as South India, the work has only just begun. In other parts of the world, such as West Africa, anthropologists and historians have been recovering the archives and histories of commercial African photography for nearly three decades.35 A promising terrain to move forward in the study of the world history of photography is located in comparative research of photography produced in the majority world. Tamil studio photography is good to think both for empirical data it provides to begin writing Indian histories engaging in Indian photography and for the comparative research available within the majority photography. My sincere hope is that this overview of the making and the content of the stars.archive will inspire students and researchers to engage more deeply with it.
Notes
On the consumption of Kodak cameras, see Mahadevan, Very Old Machine, 37–38, chap. 5. On Kodak advertisement in Indian newspapers, see Orpana, “Finding Family in The Times of India's Mid-Century Kodak Ads.”
Madurai, located in south central Tamil Nadu, is the third-most populated city (1.4 million people) in the state.
In 2018 a team from the Institut National du Patrimoine conducted an in-depth study of the physical archive of STARS and proposed a series of conservative measures to be taken. The results of this investigation have been recently published: Loprin et al., “Connaître, documenter et conserver la photographie de studio indienne.”
I coordinated this project with K. Ramesh Kumar, photographer and head of the IFP Photo Archive, and benefited from the untiring enthusiasm and efforts of J. Anandha Jothi and P. Chandran. The fieldwork was carried out through a twelve-month pilot project: https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP737.
K. Ramesh Kumar, J. Anandha Jothi, and I were joined by M. Arun, S. Mehala, K. Vinnoli, Alexandra de Heering, and Vanessa Caru. A short documentary (produced in 2018 by Pierre de Parscau for CNRS Images) illustrates the nature of the collaborative work undertaken to build up the stars.archive: see “Une autre histoire de l'Inde écrite par ses photos,” Le Monde, January 19, 2018, http://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/video/2018/01/19/une-autre-histoire-de-l-inde-ecrite-par-ses-photos_5244050_1650684.html.
The vast majority of the digital archive consists of negatives (glass and celluloid). In most cases only the front side of the photographic prints are digitized, except in rare cases when there is an annotation at the back of the print, in which case that has also been digitized.
To contact stars.archive for more information and research, please write to [email protected]. The website is nearing completion: https://www.starsarchive.net.
Pinney, Camera Indica. Pinney's numerous contributions to visual anthropology in general and photography in particular constitute the foundational cornerstone of the field in South Asia.
Sahai and Singh, Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II of Jaipur; Carotenuto, Power, Patronage and Portraiture; Pramod Kumar, Posing for Posterity.
One personal collection belonging to the Thondaimans, a former royal family of Tamil Nadu, was digitized during the STARS project, and Valentine Dumas explored in her MA thesis the issues of hybridity of dress in their photographs. Dumas, “S'habiller à l'occidentale?”
It was during the 2019 conference “Photo Archives VII: The Majority World,” held in Florence, that I first encountered Shahidul Alam's notion in his keynote speech. Alam is the recipient of numerous international prizes and the founder of the Drik Picture Library, the Pathshala South Asia Media Institute, and the photo festival Chobi Mela.
Pinney, Coming of Photopgraphy in India; Pinney and Punjabi, Artisan Camera; Karlekar, Revisioning the Past.
The Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru has established among its collections a photo archive dedicated to photography across India and organized regionally. Images from the four southern states are for the moment few in number.
My heartfelt thanks to my friend and colleague Vanessa Caru (CEIAS-CNRS/EHESS), historian of the colonial period and part of the STARS collective, for making these sources known to me.
These titles include, according to the glossary of the British Library: Madras Register, Madras Almanac, Madras Almanac and Compendium of Intelligence, Madras New Almanac and Compendium of Intelligence, and Asylum Press Almanac and Compendium of Intelligence. My investigation of these sources is incomplete. I carried out a preliminary exploration in the India Office Library in 2018. My subsequent in-depth research plan was foiled by the pandemic and now relies mostly on the small handful of volumes available online.
Hughes and Stevenson, “South India Addresses the World,” examines a fascinating and often neglected aspect of the development of photography in South India, that of the production and circulation of postcards.
In social anthropology the notion of urgent ethnography refers to fieldwork aimed at documenting endangered social and cultural practices.
I refrain from naming the studios since the owners of these studios or their families still live and work in the town.
Kumkum (kuṅkumam), also known as sindhoor, is a red powder used for ritual and social purposes.
Āratti is the common worship ritual offered to deities, whereby a camphor flame is lit on a plate and circulated around the representation of the deity. The flame acquires the power of the deity and is passed on to the devotees, who cup their hands over the flame and then over their faces and thus obtain purification.
The architecture of several studios visited during the project still bears witness to the necessary use of sunlight at the time of exposure, and numerous others recall similar logistical adaptations. In a paper titled “Consuming and Producing Photography: An Investigation into Sunlight Photo Studios Tamil Nadu, India (1880–1980),” K. Rameshkumar offered a fascinating comparison of the use of sunlight in seven studios during the panel dedicated to studio photography.
The negatives in figures 10, 11, and 12 are presented here in positive, hence the pink/red looks blue/green.
I thank one of the anonymous reviewers of the article for suggesting Hirsch and Spitzer, School Photos in Liquid Time, as a useful study for offering insights into institutional portraiture.
Weddings are presently the most lucrative and sought-after contracts for studios and freelancers.
The Hindu and Jain ritual ceremony of prāṇa pratiṣṭhā refers to the consecration of murthis (representation of deities). The “opening of the eyes” of the murthi (thereby bringing it to life) is akin to the work of these studio artists.
The 1998 landmark work Une anthologie de la photographie africaine et de l'océan indien, edited by Jean Loup Pivin and Pascal Martin Saint Leon, provides a rich array of the diversity of the research undertaken.
