Burma : Frontier Photographs

At the boundaries of the British Empire, photography pushed at its own frontiers. These two hundred and fifty photographs, published here as a collection for the first time, provide a valuable and very specific record of Burma between the First and Second World Wars, when the British and Indian military had a profound impact on its peoples and territories at a key period in the region's political reassessment and redefinition. The images are selected from James Henry Green's extensive photography of recruitment and slave-release campaigns in the northern parts of Burma. They explore his personal documentation of the processes of contact, change and exchange in the early part of this century, at the frontiers of religion, trade, the military, education and identity. These photographs - ranging from spectacular landscapes to intimate portraits - served Green as documentation of his anthropological and military work, predominantly among the Kachin, Shan and Chin people; they also chronicle his personal journeys. The pictures taken by Green in Burma form part of the history of a long line of photographers working on the Indian subcontinent from the inception of the medium. These pioneers, mostly amateur and often in official employment in the expanding empire, used the camera not only for their own amusement, but also as a serious documentary tool in the creation of archives relating to contact with little-known peoples. Today, these photographs, in conjunction with contemporary oral histories, are vital tools in the latest anthropological research into the events they record. This comprehensively illustrated record of a vanished time offers a window not only on to a particular people at a particular point in history, but also on to ways of looking, illuminating our own assumptions, fears and desires.