Usage of photography and iconography by missionaries
Martin Henry Postcard Collection, Bengaluru. Date and place unknown.
Plauge Hospital and Travelling tent for medical help during the plauge by the missionaries.
Excerpts from- Seeing like the Missionary:
An Iconography of Education in Mysore, 1840–1920,
Article by Janaki Nayar
Missionaries working in Mysore, as elsewhere in India, took enthusiastically to the new art of photography from the 1840s, to record their ‘views’ of the society they undertook to transform. The use of the camera and the photographer's evidentiary superiority to document, record, celebrate and annotate educational progress, improvement and enlightenment. By exploring a range of photographs focused on their educational endeavours, plague relief camps and hospitals Especially in southern India. There was an emerging field of power around the camera.
Evangelising was, however, early on, allied with education as a way for missionaries to make their way into a complex, hierarchical society with learning traditions of its own. How did the missionary ‘see’ the Indian classroom, and invite the viewer of their photographs to participate in its narrative of ‘improvement’? What was the place of the photograph at a time when meticulous written records were kept of victories and reverses in the mission field of education?
Pial or Verandah School
Source: Clare Arni/Martin Henry Postcard Collection, Bengaluru.
Note: Date and place unknown.
Wesleyan Mission Girls’ Boarding School, Bangalore, 1901
Source: Lamb’s photo album, Box 624 C, Edith A. Lamb, Mysore South India 7 August 1901
© The Methodist Church/TMCP.
Revealing the work of the photograph in aiding missionary work must perforce begin with the more instrumentalist uses of this new art, as technologies of recording par excellence, before turning to the possible ways of looking at photographs, whether by those contemporaries of the missionaries who were physically distanced from the location, and were yet linked to their work in India, or when they formed part of the contemporary historian’s archive. Here one may exploit photography’s ‘inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy’ instead of its truth-telling capacity. I am precisely posing a dynamic and perhaps even antagonistic relationship between the copious written and the sparser visual record of educational changes in Mysore in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This investigation of the visual field in the service of education also allows us also to speculate about the specific aesthetic achievements of missionary photography, with its own pedagogic goals.
Missionary societies admittedly placed greater value on the written word than on the sketch or the photograph, particularly in the period up to 1914. Portraits in writing were produced with ‘the speed and truth of the photograph’.
The painstaking record-keeping and the photographs helped uncover not only moments when they converged and complemented each other but also when they revealed those gaps and differences or contradictions in the missionary enterprise.
There is no doubt that many of the photographs came to be used for propagandistic work in the metropole, of which the missionary postcard and the souvenir are good examples, often coming much later than when the image was first produced. Little is known of the relationship between those who posed for or depicted in the photographs and their role in their framing; Their very heterogeneity could reveal an interest in preservation, forms and sources of manipulation of the image, and also the circumstances under which such photographs were taken.
Source: Clare Arni/Martin Henry Postcard Collection, Bengaluru.
Note: Date and place unknown.
Missionary knowledge production was unlike the ethnographic survey and report and the
mission photograph was rarely displayed in exhibitions or museums. Christraud M. Geary reminds us that only a proportion of photographs were intended for stylized or public circulation (notoriously the postcard), though researchers today have access to many personal photographs that were never intended for more widespread viewing. The relationship of power between photographer and the photographed subject could, therefore, be profoundly unidirectional, as in the former case, or more of a negotiation, less posed or stylistic, even effective, as in the personal album.
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