The Full Feature: The Lafayette Studio and Princely India

The negative archive of the Lafayette Photography Studio, discovered in 1968 and now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, reveals a panoply of Indian rulers who made the arduous trip to the heart of the Empire and were photographed heavily bejewelled and in exotic finery–the courts of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII expected no less of them. The immaculately preserved negatives in this collection reconstruct a vanished history of opulence, grandeur and pageantry that laced the great state occasions of this period. In these images, M. Lafayette (Late of Paris) of Bond Street, presents the Maharajas, Maharanis and Nawabs as they wished to be remembered by posterity.