North-West Frontier—Burke, Baker, and others | Album of photographs, c. 1860s-1870s

North-West Frontier—John Burke, William Baker, and others

Album of photographs of the North-West Frontier. c. 1860s-1870s

Oblong folio (304 x 290mm.), 23 albumen photographs, mostly c. 240 x 290mm., individually mounted on card mounts, one panorama mounted across a double page in two 100 x 305mm. sections, 16 photographs captioned "Burke" or "Baker & Burke", lower margin of each mount with manuscript caption, contemporary brown morocco, edges gilt, silk endpapers, photographs slightly faded, some foxing to mounts, binding worn

John Burke and William Baker "rank among the earliest war, news and landscape photographers in the Indian subcontinent", producing a valuable pictorial record of the areas between Kashmir and Kabul (Khan, "Introduction", From Kashmir to Kabul). The album includes an early photograph by Burke (c. 1861, captioned "View of the Murree Hills"), which shows William Baker's Peshawar business and branch office, opened in Murree that year (cf. From Kashmir to Kabul, pp. 40-41). A striking double-page panorama shows the Camp of the 1st Division, Khaibar Column, located at Safed Sang near Gandamak, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War in May 1879. Otherwise, there are views of locations including the Murree Hills, the Khaibar Pass, Jalabad, Dakka, and Khairabad.

LITERATURE:

Omar Khan, From Kashmir to Kabul