AMSTERDAM.- This summer the Rijksmuseum’s photography gallery presents Crossings, an exhibition of photographs from the Indian subcontinent. It presents 19th-century British colonial photography in dialogue with contemporary work by French-Sri Lankan photographer Vasantha Yogananthan. The show is an outcome of a two-year research project that studied the Rijksmuseum’s collection of British colonial photography in detail for the first time. It involved the identification, cataloguing and description of some 1200 photographs. The exhibition presents a selection of these images alongside the work of Yogananthan, who, more than a century after the photographs were taken, explored his own background in the same region. Crossings. Photography from the Indian Subcontinent runs from 4 July to 12 October 2025 at the Rijksmuseum.

British colonial photography in the 19th century

The Rijksmuseum photography collection holds some 1200 19th-century images from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet. Parts of this region remained under British colonial rule until the mid-20th century. In many cases the photographs were commissioned for European and American audiences who weren’t familiar with the region. Two of the most famous photographers involved were Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902) and Samuel Bourne (1834-1912), who captured images of temples, cities, landscapes and people. This show presents 11 of their works alongside 9 by other photographers. While the photographs appear to offer an objective view of the world, it is clear to us that they reflect the interests of the people who commissioned them. That said, they were often the first-ever photographs of important monuments and archaeological sites, making them valuable sources of information.

Vasantha Yogananthan

The exhibition combines and contrasts the colonial gaze with that of Vasantha Yogananthan (b. 1985), who builds on the rich photographic tradition that has developed in the Indian subcontinent. The Rijksmuseum show presents a selection of images from Yogananthan’s series A Myth of Two Souls. For this project he made 13 trips to India, Nepal and Sri Lanka to explore the ways in which ancient stories, myths and traditions continue into the present day. The series depicts scenes from the Ramayana, the celebrated Hindu epic symbolising the struggle between good and evil. Written around 300 BCE, it tells the story of the exiled prince Rama and his wife Sita, who is kidnapped and held captive by the demon Ravana. In the end Sita regains her freedom, but only after a long and bloody struggle. In his personal interpretation of the epic, Yogananthan uses old photographic techniques such as colouring prints by hand.