Illuminating India: Photography 1857 - 2017

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at photography in India.

The show uses three pivotal dates to tell the story, the Indian Mutiny in 1857, independence and partition in 1947 and contemporary work. My favourite section was the one on the Mutiny as it looked at the birth of photography in India and used that to tell the story. I was fascinated in how quickly after the events that the demand for photographs of the main sites appeared and the idea of ruins tourism. It reminded me of the how the same things happened in Paris after the Commune.

The show was full of snippets of fascinating stories such as that of photographers Robert and Harriett Tytler who not only photographed the site of the Mutiny but were responsible for selling the contents of the Red Fort buying a crown and two thrones themselves which they later sold to Queen Victoria. Also Helen Messinger Murdoch who, at the aged of 51, started a tour to photography the world and was an early pioneer of colour photography.

I thought the 1947 section was a bit thin however I was interested to see how Henri Cartier-Bresson came to India and took some of the famous images of the death and funeral of Gandhi and Margaret Bourke-White’s pictures of the exodus.

I liked the fact that contemporary work was represented by three photographers of which I liked Vasantha Yogananthan’s “Myth of Two Souls” inspired by an epic poem using lines from the poem as titles for contemporary pictures. I loved a picture of a cricket pitch with a telegraph pole in the middle. The phone lines radiating out from it made it look like the glass on the photograph had broken.

Closes on 22 April 2018.

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