Hyree Lake. South End of the Lake

This albumen print from 1863 captures the south end of Hyree Lake, made during Samuel Bourne's very first year in India — the same year he arrived in Calcutta and embarked on his first major Himalayan photographic expedition. Bourne left Simla on July 29, 1863, with roughly 30 porters hauling his heavy equipment, traversing the Simla Hills and Sutlej River valley, returning with 147 negatives. This image is almost certainly one of those hard-won photographs, made under physically demanding conditions at altitude in the Indian subcontinent.

Bourne worked primarily with a large-format 10x12-inch plate camera using the Wet Plate Collodion process — an extraordinarily cumbersome technique in the field, requiring glass plates to be coated, exposed, and developed before the chemical emulsion dried. The final albumen print, made by coating paper with egg-white and silver nitrate, produces the characteristic warm sepia tones and fine detail visible here. Bourne is widely regarded as one of the finest landscape photographers of 19th-century India, celebrated for his compositional eye and technical mastery. This early lake study demonstrates the serene, carefully structured landscape aesthetic that would define his celebrated career at Bourne & Shepherd studios.