John McCosh

John McCosh or John MacCosh or James McCosh (Kirkmichael, Ayrshire, 5 March 1805 – 18 January / 16 March 1885) was a Scottish army surgeon who made documentary photographs whilst serving in India and Burma. His photographs during the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–1849) of people and places associated with the British rule in India (for which he is best known), and of the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852–1853), count as sufficient grounds, some historians maintain, to recognise him as the first war photographer known by name. McCosh wrote a number of books on medicine and photography, as well as books of poetry. John McCosh took the earliest known photographs of Sikhs and their ruler, Duleep Singh.

Roddy Simpson has written of McCosh's photographs that "Given the circumstances, these images are a considerable achievement and, regardless of artistic merit, are historically very important". Taylor and Schaaf have written that "McCosh fashioned compositions that were exceptional for the period" was wrecked off the desolate and remote Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean. Of the 97 people aboard, 21 survived, with McCosh the only surviving passenger. They were rescued on 26 October by a US sealing schooner, General Jackson, and taken to Mauritius. He wrote a book describing his experience, Narrative of the Wreck of the Lady Munro, on the Desolate Island of Amsterdam, October, 1833 (1835).

In 1840 or 1848.

He was sent to Almora, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and to Jalandhar in the Punjab. such as Duleep Singh, He also captured a photograph of Maharani Jind Kaur, which is now lost, and images of Bikram Singh Bedi (direct descendant of Guru Nanak), and Diwan Mulraj. His fifty photographs of Burma from 1852 are the earliest images of the country to have survived and his were the earliest photographic studies of Burmese people.

In 1856, McCosh advised assistant-surgeons serving in India to take-up photography: Furthermore, McKenzie states that McCosh never snapped images of live combat zones. Topography of Assam. Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1837. Title-page of 'Medical Advice to the Indian Stranger' (1841) by John McCoshMedical Advice to the Indian Stranger. 1841. Advice to Officers in India. Revised edition. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1856 Nuova Italia, a Poem. Second series. 1875. Grand Tours in Many Lands, a Poem in 10 Cantos. 1881. Sketches in Verse at Home and Abroad: And from The War of the Nile in Ten Cantos. London: J. Blackwood, 1883.

Publications with material about McCosh The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Oxford: Oxford University, 2005. Edited by Robin Lenman. Includes a short biography on McCosh. Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007. By Roger Taylor with Larry John Schaaf. . Includes a profile of McCosh.

Collections National Army Museum, London.

Photograph gallery

Punjab

Burma