[GRAHAM, Robert Blackall]. Photographic Illustrations, with a Description of Mandalay & Upper Burmah Expeditionary Force, 1886-87. By a Cavalry Officer.

[GRAHAM, Robert Blackall]. Photographic Illustrations, with a Description of Mandalay & Upper Burmah Expeditionary Force, 1886-87. By a Cavalry Officer. Birmingham: A. Pumphrey, Photographic Publisher. [1887].

4to. Original red publisher’s cloth with bevelled edges, spine and front cover lettered in gilt; ff. [64], with 59 leaves with mounted albumen prints (c. 100 x 113 mm) ruled with red and descriptive text beneath image; short splits to joints restored, cloth a little marked, sunning to spine and upper corner of front board; cockling to pages, red smudge to verso of front free endpaper, a little spotting to endpapers and final leaf, some light and infrequent marks, versos of nos 24, 27, 32 neatly reinforced to inner margins; very good.

Scarce first edition, in the original publisher’s binding, providing a photographic record of the Third Anglo-Burmese War, by a participant and eye-witness.

With this war Upper Burma and the whole of the country had come under British control, and a province of India. The pictures documenting this period of history ‘are necessarily small, as they were taken by apparatus capable of being carried by an Officer in the field, the negatives being on Eastman’s paper’ (preface). The views are taken in and around Mandalay, showing street vendors, priests, the Palace, Merchant Street, Kyaung on Mandalay Hill, the Cemetery, scenes on the Irrawaddy, and group portraits of the British Army officials, including Sikh units. This is one of the best visual records for this period.

The albumens include twenty-nine topographical views, the majority of which are Rangoon or its environs (including eight river scenes), fourteen ethnographic portraits of the Burmese, and fourteen group photographs of British Army personnel.

A printed slip loosely inserted in the Getty copy, which contains traces of soot to several pages, reports a fire at the publisher’s premises on 8 December 1887, perhaps the cause of the book’s relative rarity.

OCLC locates only two copies held in institutions in the UK (British Library and SOAS) and eight in the US (Getty, Wolfsonian-Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, US Military Academy, New York Public Library, Georgetown, and Harvard).

SKU: 2097660