An Indian Album

Cecil Beaton.

B.T. Batsford Ltd.. London. Winter, 1945-6. First edition. Hardback, octavo; orange cloth-bound hardback with blue titles, top-edge orange, dust jacket. Black-and-white frontispiece, [viii], 78 pages of black-and-white photographs. English 230 x 175mm. 0.35kg. . Very good, in very good dust jacket; slight spotting to endpapers and page edges, no inscriptions; slight wear to edges of jacket, slight toning to spine with a few small marks, not price-clipped.

Cecil Beaton's photographs of war-time India. Beaton was sent to the Far East during World War II to take photographs for the Ministry of Information. He visited India in 1944 and An Indian Album brings together a collection of the photographs he took there. As well as images of Indian soldiers there are photos of local people, workers, customs and rituals, street scenes and cultural monuments. The book differs from India, published in Bombay by Beaton in the same year, with its own text and a different selection of images.