Art Ew - National Gallery of Australia

collection focus
Samuel Bourne
Wanga Valley, view 1860s
albumen silver photograph
29.0 x 24.0 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
48 national gallery of australia
Ricketts photography collection
Since 1973 the Gallery’s photography collection has
grown to include about 15,000 Australian and international
works, with the latter category chiefly being by twentiethcentury
European and American photographers. An
energetic program of acquiring South and Southeast Asian
photographs began in 2006 after Director Ron Radford
initiated a more central role for art of the Asia–Pacific
region. In February 2007 the Gallery acquired more than
200 nineteenth-century photographs from India along with
a small group of works from Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon
(Sri Lanka). These came from a collection assembled over
thirty years in London by Howard and Jane Ricketts whose
holdings and research have formed the basis of a number
of pioneering survey shows of Indian photography. Chiefly
dating from the 1850s to the 1880s, the photographs
from the Ricketts collection acquired by the Gallery include
individual photographs on paper and those in albums and
illustrated books by the best-known British photographers
who collectively made some of the earliest images in India,
Burma and Ceylon.
India was one of the first countries outside Europe
and America to take up photography. By January 1840
a daguerreotype apparatus was for sale in Calcutta
(Kolkata). Despite the difficulties of photochemistry in
a tropical climate, a number of daguerreotype studios
existed in India. Surviving daguerreotypes from anywhere
in Asia, however, are scarce. From the mid-1850s the
daguerreotype was superseded by the alternative process
of photographs on paper from a negative on glass. The
process appealed to the legions of mostly British men
stationed in India as part of the East India Company and
other colonial ventures. It was a diversion and a way of
conveying what India was like to families, friends and
investors. Photography also became for Indians a means
of presenting themselves to the foreigners. Government
bodies also soon adopted pioneering survey projects using
photography to encompass and manage the huge physical
and cultural diversity of India.
Among the earliest works in the Ricketts collection are
twenty-six views from 1858 of significant sites in the First
War of Independence (also known as the Indian ‘Mutiny’).
These were taken by Italian-born British professional
photographer Felice Beato, who, having previously
photographed in the Crimea and the Middle East, was
the most experienced photographer to work in India. His
images are the only known photographs of many of the
historic buildings in the conflict that were later demolished.
Beato went on to China in 1860 where he made pictures
of the Boxer rebellion (of which an album is also held by
the Gallery) and then established a studio in Japan. Beato
went to Burma in 1885 to document the Third Burma War.
He remained there developing studios which specialised in
photographs of ‘Burmese beauties’ and ‘native types’.