Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Envisioning Asia) | 
|  | | | Title: | Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Envisioning Asia) | | Author: | Christopher Pinney | | Publisher: | University Of Chicago Press | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 11 April, 1998 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0226668665 / 9780226668666 | | List Price: | $30.00 | | You Save: | $3.00 | | Amazon Price: | $27.00 | |
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Product Description
A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy.
These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.
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Customer Reviews:
• Ground-breaking, But Leaves Rough Ground... 24 August, 2000
There are not many books or articles out there that treat the subject of photography in India in any sort of analytical fashion, and for being one of the first in its field, this book breaks some truly fascinating ground. The first half of this books traces the history of photography in India from its invention in the 19th century to its current forms, while the second half focuses more on the role of photographs in contemporary Indian society. I found the first half of it much more engaging and interesting simply in the material that Pinney uncovers through archives in both India and the United Kingdom, which he links through a very intricate analysis of colonial relations in the 19th century through an emphasis on anthropological photography (perhaps the highlight of the book). The second half of the book is rather repetitive and Pinney adopts a much more narrative style which does not prove effective in the end; it reads at times like a series of anecdotes strung together and the analysis becomes thinner and thinner as the book nears its end. In the conclusion, the book ends with some interesting observations about the role of the image in postcolonial India, yet these observations are not rigorously grounded in the analyais the precedes them. Nevertheless, Pinney had set out on a very difficult task in a field which is rife with lists and dates rather than analysis and paradigms, and as such, this is a fine, critically-engaged book, and essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonialism, visuality, or modernity.
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