Background
Samuel Bourne was born on October 30, 1834 in Nottingham, United Kingdom.
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Samuel Bourne was born on October 30, 1834 in Nottingham, United Kingdom.
After being educated by a clergyman near Fairburn, he secured a job with Moore and Robinson's Bank, Nottingham in 1855. His amateur photographic activities started at about this time and he quickly became an accomplished landscape photographer, soon lecturing on photography and contributing technical articles to several photographic journals.
In 1858, Samuel Bourne made a photographic tour of the Lake District, and in 1859, displayed photographs at the Nottingham Photographic Society's annual exhibition. The following year, his photographs were also shown in London, at the London International Exhibition of 1862. This reception he received motivated him to give up his position at the bank, and set sail for India to work as a professional photographer; arriving in Calcutta early in 1863.
In 1863 Samuel Bourne formed a partnership in Simla, India, with Charles Shepherd, who ran the oldest photographic firm in that country. He led three expeditions to the Himalayas (1863, 1864 - for nine months - and 1866), during which he reached the Mamrung Pass at a record height of 18,600 feet. He opened a branch of Bourne & Shepherd in Calcutta before returning to England in 1872, where he established S. Bourne & Co., a cotton and doubling manufacturing company. Bourne retired in the early 1900s to take up watercolor painting.
During his lonely treks in the Himalayas, he took to writing about his adventures, much of whfch was later published.
The photographer is reported to have made approximately 1,500 negatives in the Far East, most of which were of the Himalayas. Chiefly a landscape photographer, he was noted for the clarity of his images and the full range of tones expressed in his albumen prints (derived from the collodion wet-plate process). He also exhibited a sensitive hand in his portraits of native peoples in the places he visited.
