Zahid R. Chaudhary
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816677481
- eISBN:
- 9781452946023
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816677481.003.0003
- Subject:
- Art, Photography
This chapter analyzes documentary photography in the wake of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 through a reading of the work of commercial photographer Felice Beato. Beato produced a series of photographs ...
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This chapter analyzes documentary photography in the wake of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 through a reading of the work of commercial photographer Felice Beato. Beato produced a series of photographs documenting the major sites of the Sepoy Revolt, sometimes exhuming corpses of the native dead in order to pose them among architectural ruins, all for the sake of presenting the immediacy of battle. Beato’s projects in India seek, belatedly, to recapture time, even if that means restaging it. Such a project is congruent with the aims of much anthropological photography in India, which also strives to capture forms of life that colonialism/modernization gradually makes extinct. Both projects arise out of the epistemic and literal violence that lie at the heart of colonialism and, in a certain sense, are direct and indirect engagements with such violence. The chapter explores the implications of modernity’s bodily shock effects in the colonial arena.Less
This chapter analyzes documentary photography in the wake of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 through a reading of the work of commercial photographer Felice Beato. Beato produced a series of photographs documenting the major sites of the Sepoy Revolt, sometimes exhuming corpses of the native dead in order to pose them among architectural ruins, all for the sake of presenting the immediacy of battle. Beato’s projects in India seek, belatedly, to recapture time, even if that means restaging it. Such a project is congruent with the aims of much anthropological photography in India, which also strives to capture forms of life that colonialism/modernization gradually makes extinct. Both projects arise out of the epistemic and literal violence that lie at the heart of colonialism and, in a certain sense, are direct and indirect engagements with such violence. The chapter explores the implications of modernity’s bodily shock effects in the colonial arena.
