The author published in 2008 a moving account of his discovery that an
ancestor, Albert TW Penn, was an accomplished photographer working
in India in the second half of the nineteenth century. This new
publication, which moves far beyond family history, is a thorough and
much-needed investigation into the lives and work of two professional
photographers: his ancestor Albert Penn and a contemporary James
Perratt Nicholas. Perhaps because they worked in southern India, away
from the commercial centres of Bombay and Calcutta, these two
important photographers have been hitherto neglected but this volume
goes a long way to rectify that.
An introduction sets the scene in India, presenting the state of
photography in both Brita in and in India, and brings our focus on to
Ooty (Ootacamund) in the Nilgiri Mountains, where both
photographers were based . There follow eight abundantly illustrated
chapters exploring the lives of Penn and Nicholas , and then colour
plates . The Nicholas brothers, John and James, were to establish a
studio in Madras in c.1858, with a second branch in Ooty. They quickly
became known, through their portraiture work, exhibitions and their
connection with the Photographic Society, as the leading professional
photographers in the south. They were well connected (James's wife
was the daughter of the man who established the booksellers
Higginbotham's) and their business expanded in the 1860s. In I 864
they took on the young ATW Penn who had just arrived in India aged
only fifteen and a half. The following year Penn moved to Ooty and
was to remain there, running the photographic business well into the
early twentieth century.
Throughout the 1860s, the firm Nicholas Brothers expanded rapidly,
increasing its stock of views to cover Madras , Coonoor, Bangalore and
Calicut as well as portraits of notable individuals and ethnographic
studies. This continued even after the departure of John Nicholas in
1866, after which JP Nicholas ran the business alone . The author has
conducted meticulous research in museums , libraries and archives in
several countries, painstakingly identifying photographs potentially
taken by Nicholas or Penn and then working out from inventories,
inscriptions on the photographs, newspaper advertisements and other
ephemeral material if they can be attributed to his two photographers.
This level of detailed research is rare within the history of photography,
where it is not uncommon to find photographs dated to sometime
within a couple of decades. Here the author's dedication is evident, as it
is painstaking work and the results will serve as a valuable reference for
future historians. The history of the two studios is followed until the
deaths of the two photographers : Nicholas in 1895 and Penn in 1924.
Such close attention to the running of the businesses provides a very
rare glimpse into the role played by a photographic studio in British
society during the Raj. We see how important photography was as a
way of communicating with Britain and how portraits and landscapes
both helped people feel at home in India by keeping memories fresh
and alive, as well as feeding a desire for news and information about
the country. The author also focuses on the art and artistry involved in
many of the photographs, drawing comparisons with leading
professional and government photographers , including ED Lyon,
Samuel Bourne and WW Hooper.
Gradually , through the telling of this detailed yet very readable story,
we slowly put together a complete picture of what it was like to work as
a photographer in India. Perhaps because of the personal connections,
this is more than just a reliable, well-researched biography; we move
from individual details, such as the tragic death of Penn's young son
aged fifteen months, to broad context involving governors, politics and
current affairs, and the story is the richer for it. Since producing this
book, the author has self-published a further volume (The Herklots
Folder of Photographs, 2014, 154pp., 74 plates) concentrating on a
recently-discovered portfolio of nineteenth-century photographs of
Coonoor and the Nilgiris. The photographer of these photographs
remains unidentified, but he speculates that the important figure of Dr
Alexander Hunter, the principal of the Madras School of Arts, may
have had a hand in the production of the photographs or their compilation. This shows that for the author, despite having produced a
comprehensive account of the work of Penn and Nicholas, the
exploration of photography in India continues, and that can only be a
good thing.
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