Detail: Building on its activities in the field of historic photography, the Asian Art Museum Berlin is presenting to the public for the first time an exquisite selection of rare vintage prints from Ceylon. The exhibit titled Tropical Arcadia – Early Photography in Ceylon features albumen prints and stereoscopic photography from two Berlin private collections of work of the 1870s through the 1890s. The exhibition leaves no doubt about the outstanding quality of colonial photography in British Ceylon. The works shown are concentrated on picturesque landscape photography and portraits of plants and these areas are supplemented with still lifes of tropical fruit.
Picturesque landscape photography in particular harkens back to a long tradition in South Asian photography. However, botanical studies in the form of self-consciously artistic photo portraits were an almost entirely unknown commodity in the photography of the Indian subcontinent before the 1870s.
Two studios in particular dominated in the island’s photographic production at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to the work of William Louis Henry Skeen, who ran one of the most productive photography studios in Ceylon as of the late 1860s, the work of the studio of Charles Thomas Scowen was specialized in botanical photography to an extent incomparable with their island contemporaries. Scowen’s work was promoted by the company Colombo Apothecaries starting in the 1890s and many of his pictures were taken in ancient royal Peradeniya Garden, which the British rededicated as a botanical garden around1820. This was the area where Scowen established his studio. His commercial success and the popularity of just such photographs are perhaps the consummate examples of British affinity for gardens and landscaping.

An exhibition catalogue will be published.

Curator of the exhibition: Raffael Dedo Gadebusch
Assistant Curator: Janine Proll