Ceylonese Woman

c. 1880s

Ceylonese Woman, c. 1880s. Scowen & Co. (British, active Ceylon, 1876–1895), or Skeen & Co. (British, active 1860–1920). Albumen print; image: 14.4 x 9.5 cm (5 11/16 x 3 3/4 in.); paper: 14.4 x 9.5 cm (5 11/16 x 3 3/4 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the Karl B. Goldfield Trust 2018.220 European photographers took portraits of the people of the colonized nations not for their subjects, but to sell them to governments as information, to tourists as aides memoires, and to “armchair tourists” as aids to the imagination. Skeen & Co. and Scowen & Co., the two leading photographic establishments in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 1880s, rarely signed their work.