ARTICLE
Johnston & Hoffmann
Apart from studio portraits, Johnston & Hoffmann also accompanied European travellers and scholars on ethnographic surveys in the eastern Himalayan region and surrounding areas. In the 1880s, the firm was commissioned by LA Waddell to shoot and develop portraits of local people in Nepal, Sikkim and Tibet to highlight their cultural and ethnic identities. These were subsequently published in Waddell’s 1889 book, Among the Himalayas. Scholars have pointed out that with these images, as with many such ethnographic projects at the time, the presumed objective truth of a photograph masked certain deceptions and obscured the cultural fluidity of the region, such as the fact that many of the sitters were made to wear clothes that appeared sufficiently exotic to the European eye, or that some of the sitters were not from the areas that the book claimed to cover but instead from surrounding regions that had a shared population, mode of dress and customs with some variation. In July 1891, Hoffmann travelled with John Claude White, the Political Officer in Sikkim, to Kanchenjunga. The photographs from this trip were later published in White’s album Sikhim & Bhutan: Twenty-one Years on the North East Frontier 1887–1908 (1909), which was also printed by Johnston & Hoffmann.
The franchise closed down sometime in the 1950s due to reasons presently unknown.
Bibliography
Bautze, Joachim K. “The Origins of Photography in South Asia. Selected Themes.” On the Paths of Enlightenment. The Myth of India in Western Culture 1808–2017. Museo d’Arte Della Svizzera Italiana (MASI). Lugano, September 24, 2017–January 21, 2018. Edited by Elio Schenini. Genève: Édition d’Art Albert Skira, 2017.
Bekkering, Henco, Adèle Esposito, and Charles Goldblum. Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.
Bonhams. “BHUTAN AND SIKKIM WHITE (JOHN CLAUDE)”. Accessed, 22 April, 2021. https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/23649/lot/72/.
Gaskell, Nathaniel, and Diva Gujral. Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present. Munich: Prestel, 2018
Luminous Lint. “Johnston & Hoffmann”. Accessed, 22 April, 2021. http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/photographer/1_Johnston_Hoffmann/A/
Pinney, Christopher. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. London: Reaktion Books, 1997.
Pinney, Christopher. The Coming of Photography in India. London: The British Library, 2008.
“Maie Ash : Two Real Photo Portrait Postcards Of English Stage Beauty (1905 & 1906).” The Cabinet Card Gallery. November 02, 2019. https://cabinetcardgallery.com/2019/11/03/maie-ash-english-stage-beauty-starring-in-musical-comedies-1905/.
“Thibetan [Tibetan] Woman, Darjeeling.” Paper Jewels. Accessed, 22 April, 2021. https://www.paperjewels.org/postcard/thibetan-tibetan-woman-darjeeling.
Thomas, G. “The First Four Decades of Photography in India.” History of Photography 3, no. 3 (1979): 215–26.