Basis van een minaret van de Rani Rupamati-moskee in Ahmedabad before 1866

Thomas Biggs captured this photograph of the base of a minaret of the Rani Rupamati Mosque in Ahmedabad. The albumen print presents the mosque's architectural details with striking clarity. It invites us to consider the role of photography in documenting and, in some ways, shaping our understanding of non-Western architectural heritage during the colonial era. India, in this period, was undergoing significant transformation under British rule, with existing power structures being reshaped. The image could be viewed as participating in a broader discourse of colonial knowledge production, in which the camera was a tool to catalogue and classify the cultural landscape. To fully understand this image, one might delve into the archives of colonial photography, exploring how such visual representations contributed to the construction of cultural identities and power relations.