Many first-generation immigrants grow up hearing stories about a homeland they’ve never seen. A place carried in the voice of a parent, smoothed by memory, sharpened by longing. You inherit it indirectly—through anecdotes at dinner tables, through Urdu idioms you never quite mastered, through books filled with photographs that seem half-real and half-myth.
For some of us, those early glimpses of our ancestral home came not from family albums but from the pages of old history books. In my case, they often included images by Samuel Bourne, the British photographer who travelled across the Subcontinent in the 1860s. I remember first encountering his pictures as a college sophomore: snow-lined passes in Kashmir, the steps of ancient ghats, the monumental arches of Mughal architecture. They felt grand, serene, impossibly distant, and beautiful. Like someone had found a way to freeze the past before it fully disappeared. At the time, I fell in love with a place I wouldn’t actually see until years later.
Only much later did I learn about the colonial gaze, how the camera was often used not just to record, but to claim; how certain images framed the subcontinent as a landscape of wonder waiting to be interpreted, owned, or tamed. Scholars like Tina Campt remind us that photographs are never neutral. They are shaped by who is behind the lens, who is allowed in front of it, and what stories are being told, or being erased.
That is why, in our Samuel Bourne collection, we focus on his architectural and landscape work, not his portraits. The portraits, interesting as they are, carry a weight of asymmetry that we prefer not to reproduce uncritically. Architecture and landscape, on the other hand, give us a way to appreciate Bourne’s technique while acknowledging the historical context in which he worked.
And the technique itself is undeniable. Bourne travelled with towering wooden cameras, fragile glass plates, and chemicals that reacted poorly to heat and dust. He hauled this entire laboratory across mountain passes and riverbeds to make images that are still astonishing in their clarity. The patience required, the precision, the sheer physical labour—it is craft at its most literal.
So how do we sit with all of this, admiration and critique, affection and caution?
Perhaps by approaching these images the way we approach memory itself: with awareness, but also with care.
For those of us who came to our parents’ worlds late, and through books, through borrowed nostalgia, through photographs made long before we were born—Bourne’s images are part of our visual inheritance, whether we asked for them or not. They shaped our imagination before we fully understood the politics behind the frame.
The Samuel Bourne Collection is not the whole story of this place—far from it. But it is one chapter. And like any chapter, it can be read critically and tenderly at the same time.
In the end, these images remind us of something simple:
seeing a place and knowing a place are not the same thing—but sometimes the first encounter, even through a colonial lens, becomes the starting point for a more honest return.