Footnotes

An impressive series of vintage photographs of Calcutta taken by Frank Buck Rockwell, an American photographer, working out of an office at the Eagle Lithograph Company in the Entally district in the late 1940s. Each photo is mounted with a short typed descriptive text beneath, the whole produced as a Christmas present, the result of "over a year of picture taking and a lot of hard work".

The tone is set with an opening image of the photographer "in front of Ferrizini's sweet shop the leading tea and cake palace of downtown Calcutta". The majority of photographs (taken with a Zeiss Super Ikonta) are of Rockwell's everyday milieu, including workplace, street scenes, traders, festivals etc. rather than historical sites. Includes views of his residence at Agabeg's Hotel near the Lower Circular Road; workplace at the Eagle Lithograph Company (the staff making up copies of "Yank Magazine", "Sanka... in the lab with a big lithograph camera", monotype operators and proof readers, the "charming scene of our office latrine", views of and from the building), street activities (dung makers, traffic controllers, shoe shine boys, vendors of oranges, lemonade, tea, drinking water, etc, monkey wallahs, basket weavers), street musicians, "a Moslem fakir", street markets, the city "after dark, typical bustling scenes of "dreary, evil-smelling streets" and the street poor ("this little girl is probably all of ten years old. I watched her paw through the garbage pile..."), washing of both humans and animals, labourers, popular performers, a sequence of scenes at the Nimtala Burning Ghat (watched by a party of American G.I.s), swimming in the lake beside the Victoria Memorial ("erected at a cost of over 7,6000,000 rupees... pretty much a waste of money"), dance performers, the fire brigade, Sikhs, Jains and Muslims, religious festivals ("Durga Puja Immersion Ceremony"; Muhharam), areas near the Hooghly bridge, Hanshari Temple ("... I seriously doubt any American has ever visited this place before... we persuaded the keeper to unlock the bolted doors..."), and outer environs of the city, the race course and punters, a sequence of images from the Bengal Film area of Tollygunge (Rockwell talking to producer B.B. Sircar, the making of a film directed by P.C. Barua, on set and behind the scenes, perhaps for a production of Kajri in 1945), and some of other American G.I.s and American Red Cross employees.

Alongside the photographer's chatty text the photographs provide a wonderfully vivid, gritty but slightly idiosyncratic overview of the city in all its aspects bringing the streets to life. Rockwell seems to have delighted in the city, but is aware of issues beyond the surface, suggested at by an image of men crowded onto a street tram who had been chanting "Jai Hind" or "Quit India", under which he notes "Just a day later men would be killed and inured and trucks and cars burned...".