By 1889, Fred Bremner had set up his own studio in Karachi and another in Quetta, the growing capital of the province of Baluchistan. From there he travelled across the province, following the newly laid railway tracks, to the very north-western edge of British India, on the border of Afghanistan. In his memoir he wrote of his encounters there: "There is nothing the Baluchi and Afghans value more than to be armed with a gun". Much of Bremner’s portrait photography depicts men grouped together. The men were often used to represent a racial ‘type’; such images were popular as postcards during the first decades of the twentieth century.