The two men standing on the right of the composition seem to be inviting the viewer to contemplation while providing the scale of a landscape otherwise difficult to measure. The perfect balance of their position and the length of the pose time for the technique used (negative on glass collodion wet-plate process) indicate that they were intentionally arranged before holding the pose for several seconds.
We might be tempted to interrupt the analysis after observing the aesthetic merits of this photograph if the manuscript caption did not belie a peaceful and obvious composition. Reading Ayub’s Camp in the Arghandab helps to grasp the historical context of the shot. The camp in question is that of Ghazi Mohammad Ayub Khan (1857-1914), an Afghan general during the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80). After defeating the British imperial troops at the battle of Maywand in July 1880, Ayub Khan besieged the enemy entrenched at Kandahar further east. The failure of this offensive on 1 September marked the end of the war, forced Ayub Khan into exile and in fact placed Afghanistan under British protectorate. This colonial war is part of the geostrategic Great Game opposing throughout the 19th century the British and Russian empires between which Afghanistan was situated at the time.
It was in this context that Benjamin Simpson (1831-1923), a military medical officer in the Indian Medical Service Bengal and assiduous member of the Bengal Photographic Society, photographed Kandahar. Arriving in India in 1853, Simpson developed an obvious talent for photography that led to many official awards. Convinced of the legitimacy of the British colonial rule and the racial theories of the time, he received a gold medal at the London World’s Fair in 1862 for his Racial Types of Northern India and contributed to the racial taxonomy expressed in the eight volumes of The People of India (1868-75).
Appointed Deputy Surgeon General in 1881 with the forces occupying Kandahar, Simpson took photographs of the city and its surroundings through the lens of the war, commemorating key sites of the conflict, as here the location of Ayub Khan’s camp. But his pictures were also useful for monitoring, military strategy, and visual propaganda for the British, invited by the perfectly controlled compositions to admire the beauty of the region while backing its occupation.
