A sad end for Bourne & Shepherd

One of the longest-running photographic studios in the world has come to an end. The business began in 1840 when a studio was established in Kolkata (or Calcutta, as the British called it then). It grew into the most successful commercial photographic firm in India, called Bourne & Shepherd from 1866 until its closure the other day.

At its peak the business had studios in Shimla (Simla), Kolkata (Calcutta) and Mumbai (Bombay), and did tremendous busi­ness in studio portraiture, views of places, and records of social and political events. It passed through a long series of owners before its sale to the last one, Jayant Gandhi.

In 1991 a fire in the building the studio had oc­cu­pied in Kolkata since the nineteenth century destroyed a large part of the valu­able archive of negatives​—​a huge setback for the business. Mr Gandhi was able to keep going by doing film processing and print­ing but, with the move to digital pho­to­graphy and online display of images, that business has shrunk and the aging owner cannot continue. So Bourne & Shepherd, Artists & Pho­to­graph­ers has closed.