CLYDE WADDELL

Waddell was a Houston Press Photographer who was sent to the India-Burma Theatre in November 1943 and acted as personal Press Photographer for Supreme Commander Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. The photographs in this album were taken by Waddell in 1945 in his spare time, “primarily at the behest of many friends who had been constantly asking him for photos of Calcutta scenes,” as the introduction clarifies. Soon he was flooded with requests and thus decided to issue this album in a small number of sets. The photographs include such out-of-bound areas for the American GIs as a brothel and a Chinese opium den. A number of them show the GIs in the context of Calcutta social life of those days. Others show Indian cremation ground, Jain temple, city scenes, some aerial views of Calcutta, Hindu priests, crowded railway platform, betel nut seller, washer men, people lined up in a kerosene ration queue or trying to clamber into a bus through windows!