Murree. A Hill Station in the Himmalayahs, View Through the Forest

This albumen print from 1863 captures Murree, a hill station in the Himalayan foothills of what is now Pakistan, and represents one of Samuel Bourne's earliest works made during his transformative years in India. Bourne arrived in Calcutta in early 1863 and quickly moved to Simla, embarking on his first major Himalayan photographic expedition on July 29 of that same year — meaning this image was made right at the very beginning of his legendary Indian career. Working with a cumbersome 10x12-inch plate camera and the demanding wet plate collodion process, Bourne routinely employed a retinue of some 30 porters just to carry his equipment into remote terrain. That a photograph of such quality and compositional sophistication could be produced under these conditions speaks to his extraordinary technical mastery.

Bourne is widely regarded as one of the finest landscape photographers of 19th-century India, and this forest view at Murree exemplifies his hallmark approach: using the natural environment as a framing device, layering depth through dense foliage, and finding geometric order within wild nature. The title's framing — 'View Through the Forest' — signals his deliberate compositional strategy of using trees as a living frame to guide the eye. This photograph belongs to the roughly 2,200 images Bourne produced during his seven years in India, a body of work that would define Western visual knowledge of the subcontinent for generations.