PhotoBooks India

Preface by the Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

Once again available from Aperture, The Last Empire comprises a brilliant selection of virtually unknown and rare photographs of India taken between 1855 and 1911. Images include the work of the early photographers and adventurers who first recorded the glories of the Himalaya, ancient archaeological wonders, and the picturesque façade of the British Raj in the subcontinent. This collection represents British views of a land that held romantic and exotic place in the Western imagination.

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As recent events draw attention to the people and landscapes of Afghanistan and Pakistan, images of these wartorn countries are becoming increasingly familiar. The harsh beauty of the region has been luring photographers since the Victorian age, the most famous of whom were William Baker and John Burke. Their photographs of the Great Game—a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling for the power struggles of British and Russian imperialism—were an inspiration to the writer, and remain some of the most poignant images of the British Empire.

From Kashmir to Kabul is the first book to piece together the remarkable careers of Baker and Burke. No photographers of the Raj era witnessed more wars, discoveries, news events and human diversity than did these two Irishmen. Few encountered the kinds of adverse conditions, hauling heavy equipment and glass plates over steep mountain ranges, and mixing chemicals at dangerously high altitudes than Baker and Bourke. Based on decades of research, this book chronicles their early days in Peshawar and their move to Muree, the Himalayan hill station on the border of Kashmir. It follows their documenting of the Afghan Wars, some of the earliest war photography, and their return to the plains of Lahore, where they continued to photograph the region’s people and landscape. Baker and Burke’s story is also the story of photography itself, a medium that was evolving at a dizzying pace—as quickly as the world they sought to capture was changing.

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Though there are countless albums of photographs of India which include images of bazaars, this book is the first which focuses exclusively on India's commercial districts. Dinesh Khanna's work is about colour, texture, people, and a pleasure in visuality: the use of sight rather than words as a way of knowing the world. The brilliant colours and structured mayhem that foreigners associate with India-- the Rajasthani turbans and the gypsy women, the bored camels and the lurid advertisements--are as much a part of Dinesh's visual vocabulary as that other, more contemplative aspect of India: the quiet moments, the melancholy shadows, the empty spaces between the bodies in a crowd. With an introduction by Manjula Padmanabhan 100 photographs Dinesh Khanna's photographs feature regularly in magazines in India and abroad. He has contributed to several publications including India: Land of Enchantment, Festivals of the World: India, and Goa.

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After the public announcement of the invention of the camera in 1839, photography spread swiftly round the world, and by the early 1850s the medium had become well-established in the Indian subcontinent. In a land characterized by the variety and splendour of its architecture and landscapes, and the diversity of its people and customs, India offered the photographic artist an unsurpassed range of subject matter. Drawn from the collections of The British Library, and Howard and Jane Ricketts, this work is illustrated with some of the finest photographs produced in India during the latter half of the 19th century, many never previously reproduced.

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Some 30,000 children are homeless in Bombay; living on its streets, under bridges, in railway stations, anywhere they can to escape harrassment by both police and criminals. Considered a nuisance and with no rights, they are at best ignored by the majority of people. Sexual exploitation, drug addiction and criminal gangs make this a cruelly hazardous background for these young people.

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The stunning photographs in LIVING FAITH are the result of over a decade and a half of travel and observation. From the cities, small towns and villages of India -- a country of almost unparalleled diversity where every major religion of the world has found a home -- Dinesh Khanna brings us images of faith as it endures in everyday life. Priests light up the night on the ghats of Varanasi in honor of Shiva; Sufis sing ecstatic love songs to Allah at the tomb of Nizamuddin Auliya; young boys in Ladakh prepare for the austere life of a Buddhist Lama; and devotees offer wax models of what they desire to Mary at her church in Mumbai. Meanwhile, on the highways and lanes of India, taxi and truck drivers carry on their dashboards little shrines to their gods; Jain nuns walk barefoot for miles on an eternal pilgrimage; and people stop along busy roads to offer prayers at modest temples and tombs.

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India is not a place, it is an experience. And the Ganges is not a river, it is an aspect of the divine. Born and brought up in Rajasthan, Raghubir Singh felt the spell of the river, its destructive power, and its majesty. Although he lived for many years in the West, he returned to the river again and again. He saw its contradictions as part of a process of growth and change: naked sadhus and ancient rituals alongside electric crematoria and modern ports.

This book brings to life Raghubir Singh's personal pilgrimage along the Ganges, from the Himalayas, where the river rises among snows, through the villages of the Gangetic Plain, past Banaras and through Bihar, to the Bay of Bengal between India and Bangladesh. On the journey he captured the essence of the river's many different stages and moods, its strange and stunning beauty, its ferocity during the monsoon, the intimate daily lives of the people who live along it, and its powerful religious significance, attested by the millions of Hindus who take part in the ageless pilgrimages and festivals along its banks. 123 color photographs.

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Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mitch Epstein, Kanu Ghandi, Sunil Janah, Raghu Rai, Sebastio Salgado, and Others. Essay by Victor Anant.

Available for the first time in paperback, this unprecedented publication brings together the work of more than a score of photographers-both Indian natives and foreign-born- revealing not only the face of India but the visions of the country within. The book explores what Victor Anant, in his stirring essay, refers to as an India that "lives outside time."

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