[Lake Scene with Mountains]

One of the first photographers to document the outlying regions of the British Empire, Samuel Bourne made three celebrated trips to the Himalayas and Kashmir between 1863 and 1866. He photographed under exacting conditions, traveling to high-altitude areas that made the laborious glass-negative process all the more difficult. Bourne colorfully described his challenges in the British Journal of Photography, writing of snowstorms, extreme heat, precipitous descents, and even a pony tumbling onto his tent in the mountains as he developed a photographic plate. Despite these perils, Bourne left India in 1870 with more than 2,000 negatives.