Title: Conference Proceedings: <i>Photography and Britishness</i>
Abstract:How did the camera instantiate British sovereignty in imperial contexts during the Victorian period?The ability of photography to objectify and "other" colonized populations has been well documented, ...How did the camera instantiate British sovereignty in imperial contexts during the Victorian period?The ability of photography to objectify and "other" colonized populations has been well documented, but the efficacy of imperialism as a mode of imperial governance was as much a function of imagining shared political horizons as it was about constructing divisive racial hierarchies.This paper focuses on the deployment of the camera during a moment of acute political crisis in nineteenth-century India, when both the significance and the scope of British power were highly unstable, arguing that photography's unique formal features enabled colonials to picture a precarious imperial sovereignty as a viable mode of geopolitical administration.The leveling aesthetic of photography-its capacity to draw heterogeneous peoples into what Christopher Pinney has termed a "common epistemological space"-meant that it could serve as a visual register for the elusive connective tissue of imperial subjecthood, effectively reifying a useful political abstraction.Yet, as much as British sovereign authority could be embodied by this visual logic, British identity could simultaneously be dissolved by the homogenizing grammar of the medium.This paper therefore examines how colonials grappled with photography's technical and formal possibilities in ways that attempted to forge a viable imperial polity while preserving a sense of privileged Britishness.Looking in particular at the palliative, diplomatic role played by the photographic portraiture of Dr. John Nicholas Tresidder in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Rebellion (1857-58), this paper assesses how the new visual technology inflected imperial Britishness in complex and unpredictable ways.Read More