People of India; Photographs by Jason Scott Tilley

An exhibition of photographs by Jason Scott Tilley is opening next Friday at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry. Jason spoke at the FIBIS  conference  earlier this year about the photographs, so we thought our readers might  be interested in being informed of the exhibition.

Friday 26 September 2014 to Sunday 11 January 2015

People of India is an exhibition of three series of photographs, taken in India at different time periods spanning the last 150 years. It invites the viewer to compare the ways in which we capture a moment or memory, and whether the essence of a person can be contained within any given moment.

At the heart of the exhibition is a series of striking contemporary street portraits by Coventry based photographer Jason Scott Tilley. Taken between 1999 and 2009 during ten years of travel across India, his black and white studies capture a slice of India through a social and anthropological lens.

Also on display is a range of family, society and army photographs taken by Bert Scott, Jason Scott Tilley’s Anglo-Indian grandfather which capture defining moments in British-Indian history. Scott was a press photographer for The Times of India newspaper from 1936 to 1940, and head of the Indian army’s photographic unit in Burma during the Second World War.

The exhibition also shows work from the seminal 19th century photographic undertaking, The People of India. The origins of this study lay in the desire of the British government to create a visual documentation of ‘typical ‘ physical attributes and characteristics, as a means of understanding and controlling the Indian population under British rule.

People of India raises questions about the ways in which we define and document others.

This exhibition is a partnership between the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Jason Scott Tilley and the Library of Birmingham.

Photographs by Jason Scott Tilley kindly funded by Arts Council England, Artspace, Ciarans, Coventry University, FOTO8 and the Library of Birmingham.

Exhibition generously supported by the Exhibition Circle of Friends.

Details from  the  Herbert Art Gallery & Museum  website