Aesthetic of Light and Time: An Intellectual History of Pictorialism from India.

Pictorialism emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a global aesthetic movement that argued for photography's artistic status on par with other plastic arts more powerfully than ever. Archives from South Asia demonstrate the movement's thriving life in the subcontinent with Calcutta emerging as a centre and its bilingual amateur photographer-writers as major participants simultaneously engaging in globally circulating specialist discourses on pictorialism and popular discussions of their practice aimed at public pedagogy. By looking into Bangla periodical press this paper investigates how Bengali pictorialists used popular Bangla magazines in the early twentieth century to establish their distinct voice regarding what counted as artistic photography as they engaged with a non-specialist mass readership. Mass-circulated Bangla articles were not vernacular translations of knowledge and practices produced in metropolitan locations and disseminated in transregional languages like English. Vernacular was an extension of Bengali amateur photographers' participation in global photography, as they remained grounded in their historical specificity. These amateur photographers were bilingual intellectuals who wrote in English for a global public and in Bangla for a Bangla-reading publics and refraining from translating culture as they moved across languages. Indeed, articulations in vernacular didn't mean a venularization of practice; they indicate plurality of belonging and affiliation that crafted the pictorialist aesthetic of the Bengali amateurs. By unpacking this intellectual history, this paper decenters the Euro-US-centric history of pictorialism towards writing an interconnected history of the artistic movement, while also complicating the category of modern Indian art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]