Photographer

FIBIS resources

Wendy Pratt, "Life with Tea in India: the diaries of Samuel Cleland Davidson" FIBIS Journal No 24 (Autumn 2010), pages 36-46. For details of how to access this article, see FIBIS Journals. Samuel Cleland Davidson was a tea planter who was a keen amateur photographer. An example of his work is "On parade"

Indian Raj British Indian Photography 1845-1947 (Harappa.com)
Photoraj including a list of books
Tony Davis’ Antiq-Photo biographies contains many names of photographers who worked in India, Burma and Ceylon in the 19th century. The site also has many photographs of India.
The Tibet Album -British Photography in Central Tibet 1920-1950 including Photographers. This site provides access to the photograph collections of two British museums - the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) and the British Museum (London).

Search the British Library’s Online Gallery
Old Indian Photos –divided into various categories.
History of Pakistan’s photostream on Flickr
Afghanistan Old Photos. Scroll down the page to the Oldest Photos of Afghanistan taken by John Burke.
India, Pakistan Postcards from Images of Asia c 1910

Photography in India (pdf) from the International Institute for Asian Studies(IIAS)-Netherlands
Photography, archaeology and afternoon tea (pdf) IIAS. A review of the book A Vision of Splendour, Indian Heritage in the Photographs of Jean Philippe Vogel, 1901- 1913. A second review of the same book, which is available at the British Library
Ethnographical Photography in India 1850-1900 by John Falconer
Photography in Colonial and Post Colonial India (pdf) by Megan Joyce

From Kashmir to Kabul by Omar A. Khan (2002). The harsh beauty of this region has been luring photographers since the Victorian age, the most famous of whom were two Irishmen William Baker and John Burke. The book chronicles their early days in Peshawar and their move to Murree, the Himalayan hill station on the border of Kashmir. It follows their documenting of the Afghan Wars, some of the earliest war photography, and their return to the plains of Lahore, where they continued to photograph the region’s people and landscape.
Limited View Google Books . Read the Preface to the book by F S Aijazuddin, which contains biographical details. Read a review of the book by Sophie Gordon in History of Photography 2003. Available at the British Library

In the Shadow of the Himalayas: Tibet - Bhutan - Nepal - Sikkim A Photographic Record by John Claude White 1883-1908 by Kurt Meyer (2006). John Claude White (1853-1918) was a civil engineer by education, a colonial administrator by profession, and a photographer by vocation. Read a review (pdf) of the book which contains biographical information, by Mark Turin of the University of Cambridge. Available at the British Library. John Claude White was the author of Sikhim & Bhutan, twenty-one years on the north-east frontier, 1887-1908 published 1909 Archive.org

In Pursuit of the Past by FIBIS member Christopher Penn about Albert Thomas Watson Penn, one of the pioneering photographers of South India. Read the article In pursuit of the past from The Hindu and the article Chasing the photographer, also from The Hindu. Available at the British Library . (This book has been favourably reviewed in FIBIS Journal no 21.)

Sepia Prints: Memoirs of a Missionary by Viola Wiebe and Marilyn Wiebe Dodge (1990) is one of the few books to highlight the large amount of photographic material available from Christian archives and missionaries active in colonial India. Limited View Google Books. See also Missionary.

Samuel Bourne. Wikipedia Photographs in Cambridge. Also refer Pagoda Tree Press
John McCosh in Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century photography, Volume 1, by John Hannavy (2007) page 911 (Limited View Google Books). John McCosh or MacCosh 1805-1885 Edinphoto.org. There is an article "The Laboratory of Mankind: John McCosh and the Beginning of Photography in British India" by Ray McKenzie, in History of Photography, Volume 11, No 2, April-June 1987, pages 109-118. Also refer Doctor
Assistant-Surgeon W. J. Thomson, Civil Surgeon of Gurgaon (near Delhi) was very successful, as an amateur photographer, according to his obituary in 1863. Google Books. Also refer Doctor
Linnaeus Tripe, a biography by the V&A Museum. Wikipedia
The Williamson Photographic Collection is housed in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University. Frederick Williamson was a British Political Officer stationed in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet in the 1930s who was an ardent photographer.
This link from the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, Sikkim mentions some of the photographers in Sikkim.