THE SAMUEL BOURNE COLLECTION

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Samuel Bourne traveled through the cities and frontiers of the Subcontinent with a camera the size of a small trunk. His photographs, composed with the patience of a surveyor and the curiosity of a visitor, became among the earliest visual records of a world both ancient and in transition.

These reproductions, drawn from public archives, revisit Bourne’s encounters not as colonial trophies but as historical documents—traces of a gaze that was at once fascinated and foreign. Seen today, they prompt questions about distance, authorship, and the way images have shaped our understanding of place.

The Samuel Bourne Collection gathers a selection of these works, reproduced with care and attention to material detail, offering not nostalgia but continuity—a quiet record of how the Subcontinent first came to be seen through the lens.