Magic Lantern India1895/1995

Lahore Railway Station 1895/1995

Can two photographs measure the changes in a place?

The Lahore railway station has been altered. There is a new entry facade. The towers have been squared and clocks added. The country is independent. The horse drawn carriages have changed little, though they are now confined to a small part of the city. The Punjabis in front of the station have barely adjusted their turbans. The tree is the same. It has just rained in both photographs.

Jackson was fond of this photograph. In his autobiography Time Exposure, written forty years after his visit, he wrote:

"At Lahore, where we made a short stop on February 3, the weather was too bad to permit satisfactory photography about town, and I confined my camera activities to the fortified railway station. That, as much as anything I saw, brought me close to the realization that Anglo-India was still a thin cover on top of a volcano."

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