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Darogah Abbas Ali
A professional photographer and engineer from Lucknow, present-day Uttar Pradesh, Darogah Abbas Ali is best known for his photographic albums featuring cultural sites and architectural views of the city. Although his books are well documented and discussed among scholars of Indian photography, little is known about the photographer’s own life.
Darogah Abbas Ali attended the Thomason Civil Engineering College (which later became the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee), after which he worked as assistant municipal engineer for the British government in Lucknow. He took up photography after his retirement in the 1860s, eventually compiling and publishing three albums of albumen prints: The Lucknow Album and The Beauties of Lucknow were both published in Calcutta in 1874 and The Rajas and Taaluqdars of Oudh was published in Allahabad in 1880.
Bibliography
Gaskell, Nathaniel, and Diva Gujral. Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present. Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2018.
Hansen, Kathryn. 2020. “The Beauties of Lucknow: An Urdu Photographic Album.” Journal of Urdu Studies 1, no. 2 (2020): 141–76.
Patel, Alka. 2015. “The Photographic Albums of Abbas Ali as Continuations of the Mughal Muraqqaʿ Tradition.” Getty Research Journal 7 (2015): 35–52.
Pillai, Madhavan. “Darogha Ubbas Alli.” Maddifycation , May 26, 2020. https://maddifycation.wordpress.com/2020/05/25/darogha-ubbas-alli/.
Pinney, Christopher. The Coming of Photography in India. London: The British Library Publishing Division, 2008.