Water, Air, Light: The Materialities of Plague Photography in Colonial Bombay, 1896–97

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which the third plague pandemic was documented and visualized in relation to rapidly evolving ideas about disease, medicine, and the environment by engaging with a set of photo albums produced in late nineteenth-century Bombay. As one of the first examples of epidemiological photography, a new genre of photography that had developed at the turn of the century in the wake of the bubonic plague epidemic, the photo albums serve as a significant archive of late nineteenth-century colonial epidemiological, visual, and urban practices. Through my analysis of the Bombay photographs, I aim to foreground the environmental and biological contexts of cultural practices, focusing on the multiple ways in which nonhuman materials such as water, air, light, and microorganisms can drive and effect image-making. I thus propose an epistemological shift in our reading of colonial photography that foregrounds the dynamic materiality of the natural world.