Eight early Salt Print Photographic views of Pondicherry, India - 1850s - Attributed to Jules Lépine

Taken in the 1850s, the amateur photographs depict buildings and street scenes in and around Pondicherry, in what was then French India. The images include depictions of the Grand Bizarre clock tower, built in 1851, with a busy market scene below. Outdoor photography was still in its infancy, and required long exposures, so the market traders appear blurred and dynamic.

Interestingly, one of the photos (the second) gives a clue as to the photographer. A man stands outside the “Pharmacie du Marin” and has annotated the building “ma chambre” (my bedroom).

The Chief Navy pharmacist at the time was Jules Lépine (1817–1884) who worked in Pondicherry from 1849-1854 and 1857-1868. It is most likely he learnt the salt print photographic process during his return to France in 1854-1857 (when salt prints were at the height of their popularity), and returned in 1857 to take these fascinating photos. Lépine was a trained pharmacist and accomplished naturalist. Before arriving in India he collected natural-history specimens in Tahiti and the Marquesas, and at Pondicherry he reseached Hydrocotyle asiatica, Casuarina, and the extraction of magnesium sulphate from dolomite.

Salt prints were an early form of photography, most popular in the 1850s. Salt prints superseded the earliest popular form of photography, daguerreotypes, as multiple copies could be made from a negative. Salt prints would be replaced by sharper albumen prints from the late 1850s. Salted paper photographs made in India during the 1850s are notably early, before the widespread establishment of commercial photographic studios in the subcontinent.