Framed Stories From The Subcontinent and Beyond
The Samuel Bourne Collection
In the mid-nineteenth century, Samuel Bourne set out across the Indian Subcontinent with a cumbersome wooden camera, boxes of glass plates, and an ambition to see and record the unfamiliar. Over the course of seven years, from 1863 to 1870, he produced more than 2,000 photographs—an extraordinary visual archive that charted the geography of empire: from the crowded streets of Lahore and Delhi to the remote valleys of Kashmir and the glaciers of the Himalayas.
Bourne’s images, later published and circulated by the firm Bourne & Shepherd, became among the most widely distributed photographs of colonial India. They offered European audiences a vision of the East rendered with precision and calm—majestic landscapes, serene riverbanks, monumental architecture—all seen through the lens of a man both enthralled by and distant from the world before him.
A century and a half later, these photographs endure as more than colonial documents. They are meditations on seeing—records of light, time, and distance. In them lies a paradox: the impulse to possess through observation, and the acknowledgment of what resists being known.
Artist Series:
Haris Hidayat Ullah
Haris Hidayat Ullah is an illustrator and visual artist whose work moves between critical inquiry, cultural observation, and the logic of the absurd. His images often feel less like illustrations in service of an idea and more like quiet arguments—assembled from symbols, fragments, and contradictions drawn from everyday life.
Working across illustration, editorial art direction, and collaborative platforms, Haris has developed a practice attentive to how images circulate through culture: on airwaves, in libraries, across fashion editorials, and within public discourse. His engagements—ranging from workshops and exhibitions to music-driven collaborations—reflect an interest not only in making images, but in understanding how visual language shapes identity, belief, and memory.
Through his ongoing project, LWNY Studio, Haris turns his attention inward and outward at once, using his surroundings and personal history as raw material. The result is a body of work that resists easy categorization—rooted in place, shaped by experience, and marked by a persistent questioning of the self within larger cultural systems.
