Imaging the Isle Across Vintage Photography from Ceylon (The Alkazi Collection of Photography)

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The of photography in South Asa in a story of itinerant practitioners, seeking to expand the eye of the lens by exposure to the farthest corners of the world. Though Ceylon came under British rule only in 1815, it followed the maritime expansion of the Portuguese, the Dutch, Danes and the French - the first of which identified it in their sea-churts as Zeilon, from which the modern name Ceylon was derived and maintained till 1972.

An upsurge of industrialisation and a plantation boom in the nineteenth century framed the country as a repository of natural resources, and its people as "natives' in an antique land. The documentation of the cities of Kandy and Colombo, the architecture of Anuradhapura, and the portraiture of a predominantly Buddhist community therefore mark a preliminary survey of the hinterland. However, upon keener review of the images, the passageway of traders, troops and priests fuses Ceylon with a composite identity, which enabled commercial photo firms such as Plité & Co.. Skeen & Co. and Scowen & Co., to resounding success.

Featuring vintage photographs drawn primarily from the Alkazi Collection of Photography, this publication takes its viewers through a visual mapping of sites as well as tropes and themes emerging from early photography via diverse mediums of production such as albums, illustrated books and postcards. These traces remain foundational in generating an imagistic canon that etched the life of a swiftly transforming country, as did the coming of a modern pictorial language instituted by Lionel Wendt, the art photographer and patron. Wendt, some of whose eclectic and experimental works are included here from the Sansoni Collection, shifts a linear reading of colonial imagery by volunteering a unique cultural expression in the early twentieth century. Hence this initiative is a tribute to the assorted histories of visualisation predominant in the isle across, further reframing India's own relationship to the frontiers through surviving archives.