Histories in the Making

The exhibition builds upon the nineteenth-century photography of Indian monuments to illustrate the power and material world of visual histories. It draws attention to the connected histories of photography and field surveys of Ancient India, creates a regard of the complicated object that is a photograph, and showcases the historic potentials of photographic collections as creators of new and diverse knowledge.

It presents some of the earliest photographs of archaeological intent taken within the Indian subcontinent, dating from 1855, and in covering a chronological span until the 1920s displays some of the earliest postcards of archaeological views. The exhibits inform of the different types of historical material that could be created through the photographic technology—negatives, prints, cartes-de-visite, stereographs, cabinet cards, lantern slides, lithographs, and of the vast networks which photographs created, and through which they facilitated different kinds of encounters with places and things.