Where how is preferred over what

Imagine a world in which every historical object and event has been exhaustively studied. If you think this would put scholars out of work or force them to broaden the terrain they cover, you probably haven’t crossed paths with many academics, who generally defend their shrinking areas of expertise with the ferocity of a rat in a hole. When dyed-in-the-wool professors run out of subjects to study, they study the ways in which those subjects were studied.

That’s what happens, prematurely, in “Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900” at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Organized by curator Maria Antonella Pelizzari for the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, this ambitious yet defensive exhibition takes a big step back from its subject -- Britain’s colonial presence in India -- to look at the ways in which a handful of amateur, commercial and government photographers looked at that country.

Despite what the title suggests, the subject of the show is not India. It’s the idea of India that these travelers, bureaucrats, military officers and journeymen anthropologists, archeologists and historians held in their heads as they crisscrossed the subcontinent, collecting bits of information as they served the British Empire, directly and indirectly.

The exhibition gathers about 200 vintage silver prints, scores of albums and folios, a smattering of watercolors and etchings, and two dozen postcards and calendars, as well as several videotaped snippets of contemporary Bollywood films and a 100-year-old stereoscope in the form of a miniature theater. But it insists that visitors forgo a view of India for a view of a view.

Here’s how Nicholas Olsberg, director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, puts it in the catalog’s foreword: “As with all areas of the CCA’s photographic collections, these suites, single images and albums were chosen for their capacity to reveal the changing characteristics, intent and qualities of observation.” We are invited not to observe a nation, its architecture or its history, but to observe how others observed it.

How the exhibition’s images depict things is more important than what they depict. The buildings, ruins and architectural fragments in the pictures are included not as evidence of earlier Eastern cultures’ religious shrines, military fortresses or civic monuments. Instead, they’re displayed because they provide evidence of the state of mind of Westerners, who were interested in such historical artifacts for economic -- as well as scholarly -- reasons.

This is the abstract, mental space the show struggles to map. In theoretical terms, “Traces of India” is a meta-exhibition. It is less focused on the nitty-gritty specifics of individual photographs, stunning monuments or particular events than on the general categories, broad frameworks and ideological lenses through which such messy, multilayered realities are filtered.

It begins on the right track, with a promising display of 18th century engravings and aquatints of Indian landscapes by British artists William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniell, and Samuel Davis. Their handmade works bring the conventions of European landscape painting to a distant land, adding mystery, romance and a whiff of danger to their picturesque outlook.

The earliest photographs follow a similar format. Beautiful prints by John Murray, Felice Beato, Samuel Bourne and Thomas Rust depict such buildings as the Taj Mahal, the fort at Agra and the Great Arch of the Quwwat al-Islam Mosque as tourist destinations. Despite bulky cameras and fragile equipment, early photography proved to be an efficient technology for capturing souvenir views of distant lands and bringing them back home. The postcard was born; 10 from the 1920s and ‘30s are displayed here, with their fronts and backs visible.

The next gallery’s photographs, which form the show’s heart and soul, replace the pleasantly picturesque compositions of the earlier prints with a less fanciful, more point-blank approach. Here, photography is treated as a tool that documents, records and preserves -- as straightforwardly and scientifically as possible -- the visual facts of historic buildings, crumbling ruins, weathered facades and broken sculptures.

Well-lighted, frontal close-ups by Robert Gill, Linnaeus Tripe, Thomas Biggs and William Pigou stand out among the works by 12 photographers, all of whom put a priority on clarity and objectivity. Row upon row of pictures of pagodas, temples, tombs, musical instruments, forts, inscribed stones and carved sculptures hint at the immensity of the task of surveying the colony and cataloging everything of interest.

If the attempt to inventory India’s historic monuments is based on a reasonable quest for knowledge, its connection to less quantifiable desires comes through in Tripe’s 21-part panorama of the inscriptions that wrap around the basement of the Rajarajesvara Temple in the city of Thanjavur in India’s southernmost province. Zeroing in on a linear slice of a single structure’s pediment, the military captain’s fantastic, 20-foot-long image is a labor of love. Its use-value is ambiguous. The magnificent image gives mind-blowing form to the power of details and the cyclical nature of non-Western thought.

The next section, titled “India as a Museum,” features photographs of the stupa at Sanchi, before, during and after restoration. It also displays a perfectly symmetrical soapstone and plaster model of the structure -- at least as it appeared in the imaginations of its re-constructors.

This gallery suggests that photography did not merely document the ruins the British were digging up all over India, but that it played an integral role in the fabrication of an idealized past, from which the present had literally descended -- and would continue to decline, if not for their imperial assistance.

Photographic and hand-drawn prints, as well as postcards and placards in two other galleries elaborate upon this aspect of the exhibition. The first features images of Indian ornamentation at five world’s fairs. The second presents depictions of the sites where decisive battles occurred in Agra, Lucknow and Delhi. Both reveal the unequal, yet two-way exchanges that took place between colonizer and colonized.

“Traces of India” takes a wrong turn in the fourth gallery, where it displays posters, calendars and advertisements, as well as scenes from Indian movies, all made since the 1960s. Nearly all of these cheesy, mass-produced pictures include images of the same architectural monuments the British focused their cameras on more 100 years ago.

It’s amusing to see how the meanings of these buildings have changed. It’s clear, and often hilariously obvious, that they no longer signify what they once did. But it’s flat-out wrong for the curator to claim, in the catalog and wall labels, that these contemporary images of politicians and movie stars are authentic, post-colonial self-representations that replace the plodding objectivity of the colonists’ 19th century photographs with greater spatial complexity, temporal indeterminacy and homegrown spirituality.

Most are advertisements, naked pieces of political propaganda and shameless exercises in mass marketing. To compare them with the photographs is to compare apples and oranges. This is possible only when both types of imagery are extracted from their social contexts and studied abstractly -- as observations of observations. Such meta-scholarship is myopic, more like a snake eating its tail than a rat in a hole.

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‘Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900’

Where: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Sunset Boulevard at Westwood Boulevard

When: Wednesdays-Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.

Ends: July 3

Price: Free, parking $7

Contact: (310) 825-4361