Joseph Lawton

( fl 1860-c. 1874). English photographer active in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He went to Ceylon in the late 1850s and was employed in the firm of H. C. Bryde from early 1860 to 1866. By 1866 he had set up his own studio in Kandy, which because of its higher altitude was considered to have a climate more conducive than the capital, Colombo, for taking photographs. Like many of the 19th-century contemporary commercial photographers in Ceylon, Lawton offered a wide range of subjects in advertisements placed in the local press, including rural landscapes, scenes of the coffee plantation industry, the newly opened railway and portraits of diverse racial types within the indigenous population.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Lawton, Joseph (d. 1872), British commercial photographer active in Sri Lanka, c. 1866-72. Originally employed by a commercial agency in Sri Lanka, by the mid-1860s Lawton had established himself independently in Kandy. Although overshadowed by the quantity of surviving photographs by his contemporary Skeen & Co., Lawton produced a comparably fine body of work documenting the landscape and agricultural products of the island's interior. His most important work, however, remains his extensive photographic documentation (1870-1) of the archaeological sites of Anuradhapura, Mihintale, Polonnaruwa, and Sigiriya, a project commissioned by the government Committee on Ancient Architecture and characterized by a sensitive blending of aesthetic and documentary elements.

— John Falconer