In time, the first ever corpses to have been photographed coincided with the morgue displays as public spectacles in 19th-century Paris. It is also believed that the first corpses to have been photographed were Indians. Scholars believe that the crushing of the 1857 mutiny by the British, the so-called most civilised community, was so horrific that it had no parallel at least in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Historical accounts and personal memoirs expose that the aftermath of the clash of 1857 was such that in places like in Lucknow "the scene and stench were overpowering." Corpses lay scattered across the city, decaying but not removed for the shock value reserved by the British for the native onlookers. Thanks to the stubborn French inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce—who stood in his attic and fixed a patch of sunlight onto pewter and called it heliography—some of the bestialities of the Europeans in India were recorded in the form of photographs.
Felice Beato was a Venetian born in 1832 and one of the first photographers that graced the world. He travelled far and wide and whipped up a huge body of archive which is now intelligible as war photographs. His body of work comprises over one hundred and sixty photographs taken over a span of two years in India spent in Lucknow, Allahabad, Kanpur, Delhi and Meerut—all the cities that witnessed violence of the 1857 mutiny. Among them, one of the most haunting images is that of "Interior Of The Secundrabagh Where 2,000 Sepoys Were Slain By The 93rd Highlanders, Lucknow 1858."
Arriving in Lucknow months after the events, he re-created massacres by exhuming and arranging bodies, as in his famous "Interior of the Secundrabagh," to intensify public interest. The image exudes a chilling, almost spectral quality: the building lies gutted to a hollow shell, while the bones and corpses strewn in the foreground seem like the Empire’s grim bequest to the subdued, listless natives in the background.
Around the same time, Bourne and Shepherd Studios, founded in 1863 in Shimla, rose to prominence with architectural, landscape, and portrait photography, later expanding to Mumbai and Kolkata. Their Bhendy Bazaar Road, Bombay (1880s) captures the bustling charm of one of Mumbai’s oldest markets.
The eerie war photographs of Felice Beato and the landscape and city photographs alongside the 19th century racialised ethnographic photographs of colonised communities, otherwise called "Carte de Visite" portraits, are just a couple of exhibits that make up a fascinating exhibition canonising the bicentennial of photography at Museo Camera in Gurgaon. Curated by Aditya Arya, "Touching Light: A Prelude to the Bicentennial of Photography (1827–2027)" delivers an experience of photographs as tactile, analogue and momentous.
An analogue practitioner for over four decades, Arya reflected that from the very beginning “there was so much of touch and feel to photography, which we lost with the coming of digital.” While not dismissing digital outright, he stressed that “there was a discipline which has disappeared; and this discipline is rather essential to any art.” For him, the exhibition is a tribute to the great practitioners who mastered that rigour. A sceptic of the cut-paste-delete ease of modern photography, Arya seeks instead to revive attention to the tactile quality of the medium—an aspect he feels has almost vanished.
Among the other notable exhibits is albumen prints from the "People of India" series (1850s–1860s), a British colonial project that used photography and descriptive texts to catalogue India’s communities, often through racialised and pseudo-scientific classifications. Initially criticised, it is now valued as a historical record of how the Raj used visual ethnography for control and governance.
Furthermore, one must not miss out on "The Beauties of Lucknow" (1874). It is a series of albumen print photographs by Indian photographer Darogha Abbas Ali, capturing the Tawa’if courtesans of Lucknow in traditional attire and elaborate jewellery. Shot mostly in studio settings with posed compositions, the portraits celebrate the prestige, artistry and beauty of these women, reaffirming their cultural significance after the decline of the royal courts. Ali, trained as an engineer and one of four Lucknow photographers of his era, published these images in limited-edition books with bilingual English and Urdu text, making him one of the few 19th-century Indian photographers to publish his work formally.
Apart from the earliest photographs, there are some of the most magnificent works of the late 20th century. For instance, you can find Avinash Pasricha’s works on display, who spent over five decades capturing the fleeting moods of India’s performing arts; Prabir Purkayastha, whose luminous experiments with fragile film and hand-gilded prints brought Ladakh’s fading monastery murals alive again is also up; and Akash Das, who championed the beauty of slowness in analogue, reminding us of the rewards of patience can be found among the photographs. Bandeep Singh, who spoke of photography as a meditation of scarcity, where each frame was an act of restraint, while Dinesh Khanna, who mastered the precision of film to conjure images with near three-dimensional vibrancy can both be perused at "Touching Light." Above all, each of these photographers shows how analogue was not simply a medium but a philosophy of seeing; it was light made permanent.
This is also the spirit carried by Fawzan Husain, who rose from hustling for film processing to creating a formidable documentary practice, and by Hardev Singh, one of the world’s most acclaimed architectural photographers put up at the bicentennial prelude to photography. Mahesh Bhatt, who highlighted the "enveloping softness" unique to analogue, and Mala Mukherjee, won acclaim for her global exhibitions, including spectral work on the Jantar Mantar of Delhi can also be well viewed at the exhibition. The list is indeed inexhaustible. Parthiv Shah, Ram Rahman, and Rohit Chawla, each of whom brought experimental and deeply personal sensibilities to the craft, in addition to Serena Chopra, Sumiko Nanda, and Saibal Das who folded analogue discipline into intimate, community-focused or fashion-driven projects are up in full glory. Furthermore, Prashant Panjiar and Pradeep Chandra—whose works are particularly fruitful to the film buffs—grounded their work in journalism and socio-political engagement, carrying analogue into urgent narratives of contemporary India.
One of the iconic and historical photographs by Pradeep Chandra on display at Museo Camera currently is that of Sanjay Dutt, where he sits and languorously smokes a cigarette. The image was taken at Filmalaya Studios, inside a dimly lit makeup room, shortly after Dutt was granted his first bail from Tihar Jail. "We were the first to interview him for Filmfare at that time," Chandra told me. The atmosphere was tense yet intimate when this candid moment was captured during the conversation, he said. Chandra started his work in films but then went into photography jobs with various media houses. "It was a Kodak Tri-X roll and I shot the whole roll within the dimly lit room increasing the ISO from 400 to 800," he fondly remembered.
Another image of some historical importance by Chandra on display is that of a hunger strike featuring actor Shabana Azmi and filmmaker Anand Patwardhan. "She had been sitting on a strike and it lasted many days. Since I worked at Free Press, I'd always drop in late to see whether she was up or asleep," Chandra said. The protest was against an eviction drive of 350-400 families of construction workers, house maids, etc, occupying shelters in the posh Nariman Point area. It is observed that the widely reported protest on the pavements of Cuffe Parade in December 1985 embarrassed the state Congress government, which was hosting the centenary celebrations of the party in Mumbai. Chandra told me that many other celebrities would often pop in and sit for some time joining the protest, Shashi Kapoor being one of them. The moment was also a new turn to urban street protests as celebrities began associating with the cause of the people. "Towards the end, the people were happily rehabilitated at Goregaon or Malad for whom the protest was happening. Shot on my Nikon F2 camera, the photo series was widely published in India Today and other places because not many people were running at 12 in the night to capture it," he related.
Thus, when seen in a long shot and with a tolerable distance often recommended for perusal of artworks, together, the collective practice of these photographers, right from Beato to Chandra, illuminates how since the invention of photography the perception of events changed. The exhibition "Touching Light," specifically, as an attendee to the museum pointed out to me in a moment of accidental profundity, is that of “photography before the delete button.” In such light, one is reminded of the French philosopher Henri Bergson who published "Matter and Memory," less than seven decades of the invention of photography, in 1896, redefining reality as a field of images—things that act and are acted upon—where the body is a special image selecting what matters for action. As such, there is a definite relation between photography and life. Moreover, the previous two centuries can very well be seen as an era of profound photographic imagination, one where patience, chemistry, and vision fused to create images of enduring cultural memory.
Exhibition Dates: 23 August – 29 September 2025
Venue: Museo Camera, Centre for the Photographic Arts, Gurugram
Timings: 11 am - 7 pm, Tuesday through Sunday
