Reverie and Reality: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of India from the Ehrenfeld Collection

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Since its invention in the 1840s, photography has been used to record images of exotic locales. At the time, these photographs provided a glimpse of the world to a curious public, few of whom could ever hope to visit those places. In Reality and Reverie, a visual history of nineteenth-century India unfolds in an exhibition of 112 vintage photographs, including images by some of the earliest and most significant practitioners of the medium: Linnaeus Tripe, Samuel Bourne, John Murray, and Lala Deen Dayal. The subject matter encompasses famous architectural monuments and natural landscapes; daily life in villages and sumptuous, formal visits of foreign royalty; and exotic lion hunts and elephants. Included in this volume are essays on aspects of nineteenth-century Indian photography by Robert Flynn Johnson, John Falconer, Sophie Gordon, and Omar Khan. The photographs of Reverie and Reality are drawn from the important collection of Dr. William K. Ehrenfeld, Professor Emeritus of Vascular Surgery, University of California, San Francisco. Previous publications highlighting Dr. Ehrenfeld's love affair with the arts of India include Indian Miniatures: The Ehrenfeld Collection (1985) and Interaction of Cultures, Indian and Western painting, 1780-1910: The Ehrenfeld Collection (1998).