posted on 25 Nov 2018

India by Cecil Beaton

I find myself quite conflicted when it comes to the photographs of Cecil Beaton. He built his reputation as a fashion photographer and spent as much time as possible hob-nobbing with the rich, the influential and the aristocratic - and that’s not territory that I’m usually drawn to. Having said that, I do admire his technically solid fashion photo-shoots and his sense of stagey elegance. Even better are his portraits that demonstrate an admirable affinity with his subjects and a sort of fearless willingness to be unvarnished despite the social status and fame of the subjects. Somehow you get the clear feeling that those who sat for him trusted what he wanted to do with them.

Perhaps less well known about Beaton was his time as a photographer for the Ministry of Information during and just after the Second World War. Writing in The Guardian in 2012, Mark Brown noted:

“Beaton was commissioned by the Ministry of Information and (he produced) strikingly beautiful photographs which show not only the devastation caused by Nazi bombs but also resilience and camaraderie. There are also photographs from the Middle East, India, Burma and China.

In particular his photographs of Winston Churchill, the royal family and a little girl called Eileen Dunne all played a propaganda part in helping to bring American public opinion round to intervening in the war. The Dunne photograph is especially poignant, showing a three-year-old girl with her stuffed toy and a bandage round her head after getting caught up in the blitz.

It is an incredibly important image, splashed all over the world, but who Dunne was or went on to be is still something of a mystery. "It is a story waiting to be told," said Roberts. "But the impact of it was extraordinary."

This book contains the photographs of his time in India. Published in 1945 by Thacker and Co. of Bombay, this collection was never released in this format in the UK – although a later volume that includes the photographs alongside an ‘Indian diary’ has been published in the UK.

So the book is something of an oddity and rarity and in some ways the reader isn’t helped too much with information about the photographs or the production of the book. The only text is a short introduction from Beaton himself – just a page and a half – which, quite frankly, tells us absolutely nothing worth having. What it does do, though, is to confirm that Beaton brought to this commission pretty much the same sensibility he would have done to a fashion project. He tells us very little about the ideas behind the portfolio and focuses instead on how individuals struck a pose – inadvertently or intentionally positioned by him.

But that’s not to say that there aren’t some really interesting and thoughtful pictures here. Exclusively working in black and white, he brings a luminescence to his images that rather belie the grubby reality of the setting and turn each picture into a canvas. Beaton can't seem to help himself in terms of the composition of his photographs - the portrait or the carefully constructed tableau just keeps asserting itself. But that doesn't stop them being an interesting record of colonial India - a country that would soon declare its independence and change forever much of the world that Beaton has captured here.

The publisher has printed the photographs onto what is almost a thin card rather than an art paper and so some of the contrast and sharpness fades to a mid-grey which is more noticeable in some images than others. The thickness of the pages also makes some problems with the binding of the book and the printer has used then strips of adhesive cloth to give the sown collation of pages a bit more security – which, I’m afraid, doesn’t make this the most aesthetically pleasing tome you’ll come across.

As I suggested earlier in this piece, it’s a bit of an oddity and a hard book to find. I was lucky enough to come across it in a charity shop and paid £10 for it but if you want something similar you will need to buy off a specialist book dealer website and be prepared to stump up three times that amount.

 

Terry Potter

Novemeber 2018