Resource: Indian Memory Project

What an intriguing project. I first posted about the Indian Memory Project in 2011. It was small (maybe a few dozen photos), but looked as if it had potential. It's since grown in scope and content through the contributions of others. The images and text combine for a powerful digital history project. Really great work. Check out the list of recommended books as well.

The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal

Now on exhibit (through Janaury 12, 2014) at the Royal Ontario Museum: Between Princely India and the British Raj: The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal. From the Deepali Dewan, the museum's Senior Curator, South Asian Visual Culture:

"During his lifetime, the path-breaking and prolific lensman Raja Deen Dayal (1884-1905) was one of the most widely recognised photographers from the Indian subcontinent. Today he remains among the most celebrated figures from this earlier era. This book brings together for the first time extensive archival research with close analyses of the significant body of Dayal's work preserved in the Alkazi Collection of Photography. Over the course of his remarkable career, Dayal opened studios in Indore, Secunderabad, and Bombay, employing over fifty staff photographers and assistants. Together, they produced more than 30,000 images of architecture, landscape, and people that have played a central role in how India's past has been visualized. This volume explores varied topics, from Dayal's public works, state visit, and hunting photographs to his images chronicling India's elite and growing middle classes. In this way, lays the groundwork to rethink the history and practice of photography in India: as a commercial business, as an engagement with new technology, and as an aesthetic enterprise. It also demonstrates photography's unique trajectory in India and its inseparability from a larger world history of photography. This publication includes several appendices, including a Key to Dating the photographs produced by the Dayal Studio."

Also available via Mapin Publishing:

Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-century India
Deepali Dewan and Deborah Hutton
2013, Mapin and The Alkazi Collection of Photography
240 x 275 mm (9.45 x 10.8 in)
Hardcover, 232 pages, 161 colour photographs
ISBN 978-81-89995-76-8 (Mapin)
Rs.3,950.00 | $75.00 | ?48.00 | ?59.00
http://www.mapinpub.in/bookinfo.php?id=219

Indian Memory Project

"The Indian Memory Project is an attempt to trace the history of India, its people, professions, development, traditions, cultures, settlements and cities through pictures found in personal family albums and archives. It was founded in February 2010, by Anusha S Yadav."

Digital Images: Tasveer Ghar

News of Tasveer Ghar ("House of Pictures") finally hit my inbox. Historians of visual culture of India should take a look.