Scantily clad in a drape style garment, a Mohammedan sharpens a knife helped by his apprentice, in this photo produced by William Johnson in 1854-58.
His tool of trade is a makeshift wooden platform on which is placed a homemade whetstone. His apprentice, possibly his son or grandson, helps out by pulling on a rope, to rotate the wheel.
William Johnson.
William Johnson was a pioneer in the field of photography and documentation. He had arrived in India to work as a civil servant in 1848. He had served as a clerk with the civil services, and later as an assistant in the General Department at Girgaon. He had lived and worked in Bombay, then the administrative capital of the East India Company’s Bombay Presidency.
Johnson’s hobby was to capture the life, landscape and people of Western India, and this had led him to establish his own photo studio at Grant Road in Bombay in 1852 and the Bombay Photographic Society in 1854.
The Bombay Photographic Society was essentially a club for photographers. Governor, Lord Elphinstone was the patron of the Society and Captain Harry Barr was its first President – with Johnson serving as its secretary and co-editor of its monthly journal.
By 1856 this Society had grown to 200 members and between 1854-58 published some 36 issues.
Johnson’s Photographs.
Johnson spent nearly half his life in Western India chronicling the people by their religion, profession and place in the social hierarchy. The photos he produced was the English gentry back home and those who had established roots in British India – folks who were curious and eager to know more about the people of India.
His collection of photos now serves as a time machine to view the life and times of a bygone era, and course material for portrait photographers.
The Photo.
This photo by William Johnson comes from the archives at theLeiden University Library, in the Netherlands. Founded in 1575, the Leiden University Library is a public research university and the oldest centre of higher studies in Netherlands.
It originally belongs to a collection titled the Indian Amateur’s Photographic Album and was published under the patronage of the Bombay Photographic Society, 1854-58.
As secretary and co-editor of the society, Johnson produced this album in collaboration with William Henderson, a civil servant with the uncovenanted civil services department in Bombay. In contains photos not only by Johnson but also by Archibald Robertson, H.D. Rae, Albert Zorn and Henry Hinton – see the Indian Amateur’s Photographic Album at James E. Arsenault & Company.
During his time as a photographer, Johnson is also known to have produced his own daguerreotype camera and albumen silver prints for photographs. The rudimentary sharpening wheel featured in the photo is still be found in rural parts of modern India.
I F I This is an independent story produced to shed light on this Vintage Photo produced by William Johnson between 1854-58. William Johnson was a civil servant in Bombay and a daguerreotype photographer. It has been created from facts curated from literary sources and historical documents. I
