The Upper Himmalayahs. View in the Buspa Valley from Sangla

This albumen print captures the Buspa Valley in the Upper Himalayas, photographed by Samuel Bourne during his very first major Himalayan expedition in 1863 — the same year he arrived in India and co-founded the legendary Bourne & Shepherd studio in Shimla. Bourne left Simla on July 29, 1863 with a retinue of around 30 porters carrying his heavy equipment, traveling through the Simla Hills toward the Sutlej River region before heading toward the borders of Spiti. This image is among the 147 fine negatives he returned with that October, representing some of the earliest professional photographic documentation of these remote Himalayan landscapes ever made. Working with a large 10x12-inch plate camera and the demanding Wet Plate Collodion process — which required preparing and exposing glass plates on the spot in the field — Bourne's ability to produce technically refined images in such extreme conditions was extraordinary. The Buspa Valley, a tributary valley of the Sutlej in what is now Himachal Pradesh, had rarely if ever been photographed before. The albumen print process gives the image its characteristic warm sepia tones and fine tonal gradations, perfectly suited to rendering the dramatic scale of Himalayan scenery. Bourne is widely regarded as one of the finest landscape photographers of 19th-century India, and this early work already demonstrates the compositional mastery that would define his career.