Polycolonial Visions: The Photographs of Frederick Fiebig

Frederick Fiebig was an itinerant commercial lithographer and photographer who worked across a wide expanse of the colonial world in the nineteenth-century. Information might be scarce about him, but it is supposed that he made painted photographs, callotypes, salted prints and albumen prints, among other types of photographic work.

Fiebig was one of the few photographers whose views did not correspond to the narrow agenda of visualising specific infrastructural projects envisioned by the colonial regime to entrench their power over the colonies. His German origins might partly explain this, while another reason could be the shifting and changing objectives demanded by a diverse array of clients or patrons. German scholarship contributed heavily to the ideas and methods of Orientalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. It is possible that Fiebig was encouraged by this intellectual milieu to explore the native cultures of South Asia without resorting to dominant ways of looking at colonised space. In 1856, he went to London and offered to sell to the East India Company almost 450 of his own hand-coloured salt prints of “…the principal buildings and the other places of interest at (erstwhile) Calcutta, Madras, the Coromandel Coast, Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope.” As Tapati Guha-Thakurta writes in The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories, “Fiebig’s works underline the close interface of the camera with pictorial and graphic arts of the period.”

Since Fiebig usually kept the easy tendencies of the picturesque mode at bay, he could explore less familiar subjects from the colonial period; especially views of the inner cities of erstwhile Madras, Calcutta and Chandernagore. These emphasised the presence of local inhabitants (frequently living in a separated “Black Town” enclave) and the spaces used by them, over those of the white settlers. The artist’s views of structures and settlements constructed by various European powers—including the French (at Chandernagore), the Danish and the Dutch (at Serampore and Chinsurah respectively)—also testified to the range and diversity of imperial encounters that usually get elided in accounts of colonialism. By concentrating solely on the British encounter, the interlinked, textural complexity of a polycolonial period can often lose its historical details for the present-day reader.

To read more about commercial views of colonial cities and towns, please click here and here.

All images by Frederick Fiebig.

 

Click on the image to view the album