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Schaw, Chief Instructor of the Telegraph and Photograph
School, offered a ten-point list for photography, includ-
ing the recognition of borders and landmarks in remote
areas, the reproduction and distribution of plans and
maps, the documentation of military maneuvers and
the apparatus of warfare, the depiction of “remarkable
persons and costumes of foreigners, and the general pic-
turing of building, bridges, and other structures” (Howe
2003, 231). Although these endeavors were not always
directly connected with warfare, they could scarcely be
called neutral in terms of ideological meaning. Even
an army’s contribution to public works was politically
motivated by government authorities concerned with the
administration and control of their domains.
Already by the mid-1850s, a close alliance existed
between military trained and civilian operators in their
mutual concern for applying the medium to documenta-
ry enterprises of potentially strategic signifi cance. Roger
Fenton’s pictures of encampments and ships in harbor
in the Crimea of 1855 and Gustave Le Gray’s depic-
tions of military exercises at Camps de Châlons of 1857
provide early indications that independent practitioners
known for landscape and other genres might work in
support of nationalist causes. John McCosh, surgeon in
the employ of East India Company’s infantry produced
landscape and architectural views while engaged in at
least two tours of duty, the Second Sikh War (1848–49),
and the Second Burmese War (1852). His realization
of the signifi cance of the camera for multiple subjects
led him to include a section on photography in his Ad-
vice to Offi cers in India, published in 1856. McCosh’s
conviction of the medium’s importance coincided with
the fl ourishing of other efforts on the subcontinent and
elsewhere. In addition to McCosh’s fellow doctor John
Murray, British army offi cers Captain Thomas Biggs,
Captain Linnaeus Tripe, Major Robert Tytler, and his
wife Harriet Christina, were enchanted with India’s
splendid architectural past, and thus contributed to a
growing archive that increased throughout the second
half of the century. The photographic societies of the
three Presidencies of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras in
the late 1850s counted in their membership military
personnel together with civilian amateurs and com-
mercial practitioners who were also concerned with the
preservation of antiquities and peoples of the subcon-
tinent. Photographers like Felice Beato and Lala Deen
Dayal attached themselves to military operations, Beato
fi rst in the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857,
and Deen Dayal in the 1870s with the British military
elite. As a native Indian, Deen Dayal was unique in his
ability to straddle “princely India” and Anglo-India
by working under the patronage of the wealthy sixth
nizam of Hyderabad and of the British Raj, recording
palaces and royalty, as well as landscape views, military
maneuvers, and artillery.
The example of India underscores the consider-
able alignment of European military and civil author-
ity in world affairs. Photography has frequently been
characterized as an emblem of conquest and territo-
rial appropriation; witness Eugène Durieu’s report to
the French Photographic Society, “that photography
would conquer unknown territories as the victorious
armies of France conquered land” (Marien 2002, 86).
Major Charles Callwell used the term “small wars” to
characterize confl icts which “dog the footsteps of the
pioneer of civilization in regions far off” (Ryan 1997,
73). Callwell’s observations are not exclusive to war
per se, but engage an ideology of “extended empire,”
which can be perceived as symbolically reinforced by
the production of photographs as apparently benign as
a landscape or an architectural view. Early photographs
of the Himalayas by Deputy Commissioner Philip Henry
Edgerton function as illustrations of a remote area that
could well fi gure into the development of a trade route
into Central Asia. Though Egerton’s one-time journey
through Spiti was in no way clandestine, his explora-
tions represent a gathering of intelligence fostered by
competition with Russia, as evident in his published
photo-illustrated account (1863). The commercial
photographer John Burke extensively covered Britain’s
penetration into Afghanistan from the North-West Prov-
ince of India during the Second Afghan War (1878–80).
Like Egerton’s, Burke’s pictures more than suggest
associations with the “Great Game,” the contest of ter-
ritory between Britain and Russia often covertly fought
in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan, India, Tibet,
China, and Russia, and made popular by the operations
of Rudyard Kipling’s fi ctional character Kim.
The Royal Engineers’ school at Chatham began
to teach photography in 1856. The Engineers were
involved in numerous surveys of strategic military im-
portance around the world. The mission of the Abyssinia
Campaign of 1867–68 was to rescue several Europeans
held captive by Theodore (Tewodros II), Emperor of
Abyssinia. The expedition’s leader, General Sir Robert
Napier of the Royal Engineers, made sure to document
the scene of the army’s exploits; the powerful Sir Rod-
erick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society
had sanctioned the entire project in the cause of empire.
The Sinai Peninsula, a politically sensitive region that
loomed large in the cultural imagination for its biblical
associations, gained the attentions of both the British
and the French in the latter half of the century. The great
rivalry between these two powers, trailing back to Napo-
leonic France, is seen in the controversy over Egypt and
the Sinai region. The Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula
of Sinai was launched collaboratively in 1868 by private
agency and the War Department, which administered the
Royal Engineers. The expedition’s objective was to map
the area for both scientifi c and scholarly reasons. The