Quaint Analogia

In an attempt at writing a history of the times when the British began to build for themselves in India, he informs us that "neither trust nor loyalty were at that date oriental concepts. The British learnt this lesson from the mutiny." Luckily, Glazebrook seems to like the photographs, even if he is dismissive of the subjects. "There is something melancholy, of course, in a record of what is doomed, and these are sombre pictures; they pierce through colour and movement (which are the apparent face of India) to the stillness and shadow of neglect and retreat." This generous insight might have been inspired by the fact that it was in Italy, "whilst seated on a fallen column within the amphitheatre at Pozzuoli" that he "reflected on the post-imperial mood caught by these photographs". An important man, no doubt.

Derry Moore would have done well without this obstacle on the way to his photographs, especially since his own essay is a more direct, less airy exposition of his association with the places that he photographed. He has travelled through Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Udaipur, Rewa, Murshidabad, Lucknow, Burdwan, Jaisalmer, Madurai, Bikaner, Wankaner, Morvi and Chennai in his endeavour to capture not only the palaces whose days he felt were numbered, but also the hybrid quality of the lesser buildings that had been constructed since the first arrival of the British in India. A cultural osmosis was clearly discernible to him, that of British and European architecture on Indian buildings, and that of India and its climate, as well as its styles, on the British. The photographs he took—facades, interiors, portraits, landscapes—are presented full page without margins or captions and in no geographical or logical order. This curious format makes the image on the left page merge with that on the right and allows the eye to travel across frames to accord a visual continuity to disparate locations, much in tune with Moore's impressionistic spirit.

Unfortunately, the captions that appear at the end of the book do not justify this matchmaking. Short identifications, they fail to inform the viewer of the rich details of the images.The pairing exercise then remains merely a device, superficial and cerebrally unconvincing. If such a forced suspension of the viewer's spirit of inquiry does not result in the monotony of an uninformed museum tour, it is due only to Moore's finesse as a black-and-white artist. He uses his skills of formal portraiture to create arresting studies of the interiors of palaces and colonial mansions; the tonal values of these plates are an indicator of the fact that Moore is a technician in command of the tone system, capable of capturing all the scales of gray from a pure white to a full black in a single image. These qualities are consistently evident in the interiors, but do suffer when an occasional orientalist urge makes him stray outdoors to photograph copulating camels and primitive dentists. Sadly, the camera's engagement with Indian life is limited to the quaint, or to the token presence of a host or caretaker. Without a genuine interest in the people around him, Moore's photographs are empty crucibles, reduced to being artefacts themselves.

One might have dismissed the contents of this book as the trimmings of an era that a contemporary India would no longer have an appetite for, were it not for the black-and-white trap. As half-real, old-world, feel-good nostalgia, the photographs survive the test of time. In colour, the book would have been dead on arrival.