Felice Beato, an Italian by birth, began his photographic career with a collaboration with James Robertson who was one of Constantinople’s leading photographers.
Starting with a photographic expedition to the middle east early in 1857, Beato soon embarked on a journey towards the East — following the expansion of the British Empire. Beato arrived in Calcutta in early 1858 when parts of the subcontinent were still witnessing the final stages of the Sepoy Mutiny that had erupted a few months prior. Armed with the knowledge of the apparatus of the camera and eager to satiate the British public’s interest in the events of the Empire, Beato set out to record the rebellion’s aftermath. Reportedly, he had skeletons exhumed and arranged in an effort to stage and recreate what was seen as the aftermath of the Mutiny, to establish a visual testimony to the “victory” of the empire.
Photography, at its nascent stage had arrived in India within a year of its development. It was being practiced by amateurs and EIC officials to document India’s architectural heritage. Beato, upon his arrival, quickly became involved with the photography community and set up one of the first commercial studios in Calcutta with his brother Antonio.
Heralded for its verisimilitude as opposed to earlier visual regimes, the market for photographs of lands previously inaccessible to Westerners grew exponentially. Beato, in effect, became one of the early purveyors of these new lands coming under the expanding Western Colonial empires. He recorded countless sites in Crimea, India, China, Japan, Sudan and Burma. He travelled widely in the northern part of the country and expanded his oeuvre with architectural views of Agra, Benares, Amritsar and Delhi. His panoramic architectural views, landscapes, and costume studies presented to Western viewers images of foreign cultures, often at the historical moment these cultures were beginning to be altered by their encounter with the West.