Photo 230

Half-leather bound album (spine and bindings weak) measuring 240 mm x 370 mm, with Photographs written in ink on front board, prints lightly mounted on page. The majority of prints are uncaptioned: a few are lightly captioned in pencil and prints 7-11 have letterpress captions. The album mainly records bridge-building activity, in particular the bridge over the Garai River in Nadia district, West Bengal.

A letter by Bradford Leslie, the compiler of the album (or at the least the collector of some of the prints), indicates that he was employed as an engineer on the line. The letter also gives brief details of the photographer of a few of the prints. Describing print 1, he writes: '...On the bank [on the skyline] is Dr Temple's tent for photographing operations...I hope when Temple has had a little more practice to be able to send you some better photographs of our proceeding.' Prints 1-3 are, judging by their amateur quality, probably Temple's work.

A number of prints in the album can be credited to Charles Lazarus: copies of prints 9, 10 and 11, are pasted into a copy of George Ham's Illustrated Hand-book of the Eastern Bengal Railway. 1862 (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, and Co., 1862) in the library of the Institution of Civil Engineers and are there credited to Lazarus: 'Numerous photographs having been taken by Mr. C. Lazarus, of Calcutta, at the request of Mr. Walter Granville: that gentleman has kindly given me the use of the negatives for the purposes of this work, and also for the subsequent formation of an Album, to complete the series of illustrations, which will be separately published in a few weeks.' The these three photographs have letterpress caption labels pasted below the image: prints 7 and 8 are also labelled in this manner and are also presumably the work of Lazarus. The British Library's copy of Ham's guide (shelfmark IOL.1947.b.399) lacks the photographic illustrations, but contains a number of blank pages where these could be pasted in.