Traces of India

Download or read book Traces of India written by Maria Antonella Pelizzari and published by Montréal : Canadian Centre for Architecture. This book was released on 2003 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the different cultural roles played by photographs of Indian architecture from the latter half of the nineteenth century, an inquiry stretching from their pre-history to their migration into book illustrations, calendar art, and religious imagery. Beyond the apparent purposes of these images - as picturesque views, scientific records of an architectural past, political memorials, travel mementos, textbook vignettes - deeper considerations influenced the way their makers worked in selecting, framing, composing, and populating their representations. Shaping the viewer's thinking about what they represented, these images remain enduring records of a way of seeing, of minds as well as monuments, and exist today as artefacts of the visual culture of colonialism. Twelve essays from scholars working in several disciplines (history, anthropology, art history, and the history of photography) show how photographs of architecture reveal the inescapable ways in which the practice of image making is aligned with the purposes of power, the presumptions accompanying the encounter with strangeness, the internal order of the colonial and the scientific mind, and even our metaphysical dispositions toward the world.