287
Apart from this body of work—produced by a temporary
visitor rather than a resident photographer—the 1850s
appears almost as barren of photographic activity as the
previous decade. Only one commercial photographer,
James Parting, appears to have remained in business for
any substantial period. Parting traded as a watchmaker,
but from 1855–59 he operated a daguerreotype and
latterly a wet collodion photographic studio. Although
a few crude wood engravings copied from his work
were published, none of his original photographs has
been identifi ed. But Parting retains some importance as
a direct link with the founding of the most successful
19th-century studio in the island, for before leaving
Ceylon in June 1860, his business and equipment was
purchased by the Government Printer William Skeen,
who placed it under the management of his son William
Louis Henry Skeen (1847–?1903).
The developments in photographic technology and
a growing market of European residents made the
early 1860s a propitious period for commercial studios
and for the next forty years Skeen and Co exercised a
largely unchallenged supremacy in the island. The studio
(which until 1868 traded as Slinn and Co., presum-
ably in reference to another family member, S. Slinn
Skeen) established itself quickly and by the late 1860s
its catalogue listed over 400 stock images, providing a
comprehensive coverage of the architecture and scenery
of the island’s main economic centres of Colombo, Nu-
wera Eliya, Rambodda and Kandy. A major speciality
of the fi rm was the very detailed documentation of the
island’s plantation industries, particularly tea, cocoa,
cinnamon and other spices. The fact that little atten-
tion was paid to the north of island refl ects the way in
which the photographic market was rigidly determined
by the location of the main centres of European popu-
lation and economic activity. With the growth of the
tea and other industries and a swiftly developing rail
network (the latter also extensively documented by the
fi rm), this defi cit too was corrected in the last decades
of the century. Views were also collected from as far
afi eld as northern India, and in 1887 Frederick Albert
Edward Skeen, who had worked for his brother since
1878, opened the Burma branch of Watts and Skeen in
Rangoon. The fi rm survived (in a somewhat attenuated
condition in the latter years) until the early 1920s.
While the late1860s and 1870s saw a steady if unre-
markable increase in commercial studios, only Joseph
Lawton, who opened his Kandy studio in 1866, offered
any substantial competition to Skeen and Co. Contem-
porary reviews (such as an account of photographs of
the newly-opened Colombo-Kandy railway in 1868)
repeatedly compared their work, often in Lawton’s
favour, and it was Lawton who was selected by the
island’s Archaeological Committee to document the
ruined medieval cities of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa
and Sigiriya. This work, undertaken in 1870–71, was
Lawton’s most important achievement and constitutes a
remarkably powerful record—both from a documentary
and aesthetic viewpoint—of these sites at the very be-
ginning of their modern archaeological history. Sadly, it
was also to be his memorial, since he died in 1872 as a
result of overwork and illness contracted while working
in the jungle. His studio continued to trade under the
management of his widow, but closed its doors within
a few years.
Unlike India, which from the earliest years of photog-
raphy had supported an enthusiastic amateur community,
the professional studios appear to have supplied almost
all the island’s photographic requirements. While there
is scattered evidence of amateur activity—the civil ser-
vant James Birch and the Royal Engineer Richard War-
ren, for instance, had preceded Lawton in photographing
at Polonnaruwa in the late 1860s—no photographic
society was formed which might have channelled and
developed such work, and notwithstanding the residence
of Julia Margaret Cameron (from 1875 until her death in
1879), few non-professional Europeans appear to have
been inspired to take up the camera.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the
island became an increasingly attainable and popular
tourist destination and the number of photographic
studios increased in response to the demand for visual
souvenirs. Among the most distinguished of these was
the studio of Charles T. Scowen, who opened his fi rst
studio in Kandy in around 1875, with a Colombo studio
by 1883. While Scowen’s choice of subjects was gen-
erally comparable to that of Skeen and Co, early work
from his studio is characterised by the particularly fi ne
quality of his printing: this is particularly evident in the
very beautiful fl ower and plant studies which appear to
have been a speciality of the fi rm (appropriately, given
the proximity of the great botanical garden at Peradeniya
to his Kandy studio). Scowen’s stock appears to have
been acquired by the Colombo Apothecaries Company
in the early 1890s, and continued to be marketed by
them, but by the last decade of the century the majority
of commercial fi rms were producing standard tourist
views and postcards of little freshness or originality.
While a number of these studios—such as A. W. A.
Plâté & Co, founded in Colombo in 1890 and surviv-
ing up to the present—remained successful commercial
enterprises, the photographic vision of the small group
of early photographers who had documented the island’s
landscapes, archaeological heritage and economic
development had by the turn of the century become
largely exhausted.
John FalconerSee Also: Skeen, William Louis Henry; and Royal
Engineers.