The difficulty of reading the extant photographic archive of anyindividual or institution as an intentional and consistent creation isreadily apparent in the case of Ananda Coomaraswamy. A self-taught arthistorian with a Ph.D. in geology, Coomaraswamy has been celebrated forhis contributions to the study of Indian art and civilization in theUnited States and his career as the first curator (and source) of thecollection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His use of photographyoriginated with the remarkable photographs taken by his wife, Ethel,between 1903-06 that were used to illustrate his first book, 'MedievalSinhalese Art' (1908), which undoubtedly sensitized him to the demandsof printing, cropping, and masking. Like most art historians, hecontinued to amass commercial photographs of Indian sculpture, wallpainting, and architecture, but also took up the medium himself afterhis divorce from Ethel in 1910, which allowed him to make copies of theprints he purchased as well as shoot his own images during subsequenttravels to Asia. After characterizing the ways that Coomaraswamy'spublications were indebted to his photographic archive, this talk willfocus more specifically on the presence of ethnographic photographs ofIndian craftsmen (taken by Ethel) and the large number of images ofdancers, musicians and entertainers that distinguish the archive fromthose of other art historians in the early twentieth century.Coomaraswamy's belief in the racial continuities between contemporaryfolk practices and traditional Indian sculpture and his ideas about thesources of sculptural poses in dance informed his collection as well ashis field research. Parallel to but quite different from Aby Warburg's'Bilderatlas' and concept of 'Pathosformel', Coomaraswamy's use ofpopular photographs ranging from tourist postcards to dance programsbecome the visible equivalents of his early political support for Indiannationalism and Guild Socialism.
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