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Indien: Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben, By Martin Hürlimann, Berlin, Germany, Central Europe, ca 1928.

 

Object Detail

 

Indien: Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben (1928) by Martin Hürlimann is a significant photobook published by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag as part of the Orbis Terrarum series. Containing 304 full-page copperplate photogravure plates, this book documents India through three lenses — architecture, landscape, and everyday life. Hürlimann, who travelled the subcontinent in 1926–27 with a Sinclair Una camera, brought a distinctive compositional sensibility to his subjects.

 

Unlike Archaeological Survey photographs that emptied monuments of human presence, his images kept people inside the frame, presenting temples, bazaars, and pilgrimage sites as living, breathing spaces. The photogravure printing by Gebr. Fretz, Zürich, gives the plates exceptional tonal depth. Though made for a Western audience, the work depicts how Hürlimann photographed a shopkeeper, fruit seller and people with the same attention and respect that he gave to the Taj Mahal.

 

It remains a valuable visual and historical record of pre-independence India. The plates in this book demonstrate this approach well. At Madurai’s Meenakshi Temple, he fills the frame with the gopuram’s sculptural density rather than taking at back to a safe distance, and inside the Thousand Pillared Hall he balances a Subrahmanya statue against the carved columns around it. In the Volksleben plates (folklife), a Bangalore sadhu, a Hyderabad fruit seller, and a Sindhi jeweller are each photographed with the same seriousness as any monument — on their own terms, in their own settings. The Ahmedabad Jain nuns plate achieves the finest balance in the book, where human figures and architectural richness hold equal weight.

 

Taken together, the plates confirm that his method was consistent throughout: architecture is inhabited, people are dignified, and India is presented as a living civilization and very valuable heritage for western people.

 

Provenance

 

From a Private Collection in Mumbai, India.

 

Condition

 

Good overall condition.

 

Dimension

 

 

 

Literature Comparison

 

1.Hürlimann, Heinrich. Indien: Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben. Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, n.d. Accessed June 5, 2026. https://www.zvab.com/Indien-Baukunst-Landschaft-Volksleben-Indien-H%C3%BCrlimann/31989014939/bd

 

2.Angkor Database. “Visions of Angkor by Martin Hürlimann.” Accessed June 5, 2026. https://angkordatabase.asia/photos/visions-of-angkor-by-martin-hurlimann

 

3.Müller, Angela. Indien im Sucher: Fotografien und Bilder von Südasien in der deutschsprachigen Öffentlichkeit, 1920–1980. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2023

 

4.Hürlimann, Martin. India: The Landscape, the Monuments and the People. Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1932. Accessed June 5, 2026.

 

5.Beegan, Gerry. The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

 

6.Michell, George. Architecture and Art of Southern India: Vijayanagara and the Successor States, 1350–1750. Vol. I, no. 6 of The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

 

7.Hall of Thousand Pillar https://www.maduraimeenakshitemple.com/article/id/201/hall-of-thousand-pillar. Accessed June 6, 2026.
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai. Vol. 96, no. 3 (2023): 68–70.

 

8.Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1999.

 

9.Raghunath Temple,” Wikipedia, last modified [date of the version consulted], accessed June 6, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghunath_Temple

 

10.Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

 

 

 

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