In 1844, five years after Louis Daguerre had patented the daguerreotype, the East India Company informed its offices in Bengal that as absolute accuracy was essential for drawings and representations, the authorities were investing in three camera lucidas — reflecting prisms — that enabled artists to draw outlines in correct perspective. A decade later, cadets at the Military Seminary in Addiscombe were instructed in photography and cameras were dispatched to army units in the colony.

By this time, the official British mind was greatly occupied with acquisition of territory and the staving off of ‘native’ attacks on these. Conquest, campaigns and warfare were very much a colonial way of life, necessitating the growth of the army and various supportive institutions, photography being one of them. Though, of course, colonial photography was soon to develop an exciting life of its own, in its early years, the army was instrumental for much of its growth and legitimacy as an aid to truth-telling — and growing imperial glory. It was not long before military officers like Linnaeus Tripe became photographers of repute but so also did surgeons and engineers, apart from inspired amateurs. In that century of discovery and experimentation, photography soon became a hobby for the better-placed professional.

Some of the best-known photographers of the day were military men, several of them trained in methods of surveying. Engineers too were advised to keep a photographic record of public works projects such as the construction of military barracks, railway lines, bridges and so on. Advice, information-sharing and attempts at new methods were a part of emerging photographic discourse. In 1856, the Scotsman, John McCosh, in his Advice to Officers in India (written after his retirement), suggested that “every assistant-surgeon make himself a master of photography in all its branches”.

This enterprising surgeon with the East India Company was based in Lahore and Ludhiana just before the second Anglo-Sikh war in 1847 and later, in Burma during the second Anglo-Burmese war of 1852. Making the first calotypes in the 1840s, when photography was almost unknown in India, McCosh has often been described as the first war photographer of Asia. As he accompanied the Company’s forces during the second Sikh war of 1848-9, his works are among the earliest surviving ones from south Asia and are preserved in the National Army Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, both in London. However, as the calotype process was slow, there were no action shots but only those of officers and men, resplendent in their uniforms, posing self-consciously for families back home. There are glimpses of troops and of captured Burmese guns, and also of pagodas and monasteries.

Obviously, the military establishment understood the value of the photographic image and sponsored his work that included transportation of expensive equipment and, no doubt, helpers as well. McCosh documented growing British influence in both the west and east of India. He developed an impressive portfolio of the war machine as well as that of Sikh nobility and Burmese “beauties” that he captured with equal panache.

From the work of such men and from the emergent discourse around methods and techniques, it is clear that although only a couple of decades old, the many-faceted role of photography as an aid to not only immortalizing the individual and the family but also to statecraft and its paraphernalia was quickly recognized. But the blood and gore of warfare would have to wait till 1857 to be represented pictorially in all its horror. The British Journal of Photography, started in 1853 and continuing to this day, carried a series of articles by photographers, technicians and amateur enthusiasts on a range of subjects, one of them being military photography.

In an instructive piece published in the issue of September 10, 1870, “Echo” draws attention to the growing relationship between military affairs and photography. By this time, a military school of photography had been set up in Chatham, and the replication of maps and plans relatively inexpensively through the camera was regarded as invaluable. It replaced the more long-drawn-out process of lithography, and at a time when cavalry warfare, still very much in vogue, depended heavily on a knowledge of the terrain, the new process that quickly reduced plans of varying sizes to prescribed dimensions within a day was nothing short of a miracle. Echo goes on to add that “pictures of the ravines, passes and rivers were likewise secured by means of the camera, to show the real character of the natural difficulties through which the troops were to pass”.

The photograph, as an illustrative guide to artillery exercises that involved loading guns and canons, was very useful as the word-visual nexus helped convey important information relatively easily to a non-literate fighting force. Echo describes an interesting incident at the time of the 1868 Abyssinian expedition when the army was to start from Bombay, using saddles supplied from England. The men who were to use them were, of course, quite ignorant of how these were made and consequently how they were to be fitted. “To meet this difficulty,” writes Echo, a mule back home was “fitted with the trappings in the approved manner”, photographed from several angles and positions, and then copies of these dispatched to Bombay.

Soon the ubiquity of the military establishment found expression in the creativity of men like the German-born artist, lithographer and photographer, Frederick Fiebig. He gave the accoutrements of warfare a certain life of their own, as is evident from this photograph. Pyramids of ammunition that ‘adorned’ Fort William — the arranging of which must surely have taken a certain amount of architectural precision if not structural analysis, and plenty of human involvement — was taken in the early 1850s. Why did Fiebig choose to photograph these mounds of potential destruction? Clearly, violent control was very much a part of the vocabulary of conquering states — his motherland was to join the race soon enough. But he was an artist and clearly found compelling the arrangement that he then committed to glass-plate negatives.

Although the focus is on one pyramid, the composition not only suggests two others, a segment of a third as well as a turret of the Fort: the latter could easily have been left out as it is at the top left-hand corner, but its inclusion is also clearly deliberate. But in some senses, it also completes the picture of growing imperial hegemony bounded off by the iron railing in the foreground. Fort, ammunition, boundary railing — what better example could there be of authority and brute power?

This photograph pre-dated the visuals of 1857, when paintings, lithographs and photographs were to swamp the popular imagination. It represented a culmination of Fiebig’s extensive repertoire, beginning with a complete set of nearly 500 lithographs of Madras, Ceylon, Mauritius and Calcutta purchased by the East India Company for £60 in 1856. In his correspondence with the Company on one of the earliest extensive photographic records of growing urban India, Fiebig modestly noted that his pictures were taken in his “leisure time” — a statement that makes one wonder at the understanding of leisure and work ! However, taking into consideration Fiebig’s self-definition, John Falconer, curator of photographs at the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collections, feels that his contribution was significant as it starts “to blur the distinction between amateur and professional and also points towards the future dominance of photography over the other graphic media”.

He might also have added that the artist in the photographer also contributed to the sense of composition — something that became de rigueur in the visual resurgence of the traumatic period of 1857-8, when carefully-put-together scenes well after the events were not regarded as unethical or capricious.