“In the earliest days the photographs were quite experimental, showing the immediate environs, trees, archaeological sites, portraiture,” said Hapgood. “Extremely intriguing to me were the ethnographic images that were made right around the time of the uprising of 1857, when photography was put to use as a tool of ‘scientific’ study of Indians, which collided with colonial interests and a very healthy market for exotic imagery in Europe.”

This was evident in the names of some of the series of photographs taken in Bombay during the 1800s. Photographer William Johnson, for instance, exhibited photos in series called "Costumes and characters of Western India" and "Oriental races and tribes, residents and visitors of Bombay".

William Johnson
The Cotton Market, from The Indian Amateur’s Photographic Album, c. 1856–58
Albumen silver print mounted on card with text on verso, 195 x 245 mm
Courtesy of Farooq Issa, Phillips Antiques, Mumbai.

Cover photo of Early Bombay Photography, photo by Shivshanker Narayen
Group of mistress and pupils of the Government Normal School, 1873
Albumen silver print, 182 x 236 mm
British Library, London/© British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4641)

Edward Taurines
A Parsee Girls’ School, Bombay, c. 1880s
Albumen silver print, 180 x 235 mm
Collection of Gopal Nair, Mumbai

A prominent British photographer in Bombay was Captain Thomas Biggs, a member of the artillery, who was appointed as the government photographer in 1855. Both Biggs and his successor Dr William Henry Pigou shot various documentary pictures of temples and mosques for the Asiatic Society.

At one point, Biggs expressed a sentiment that represented the ignorance and lack of empathy with which many colonial officials operated – he called some of the Hindu scriptures he photographed morally “indecent” and “wrote a letter seeking permission to destroy any of the ‘truly disgusting’ sculpted figures he saw”, Hapgood writes.

Thomas Biggs or William Henry Pigou (attrib.)
Entrance to the large Karlee Cave, c. 1855–1858
Albumen silver print, 206 x 244 mm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 84.XO.735.1.56