“NOT ALTOGETHER UNPICTURESQUE”: SAMUEL BOURNE AND THE LANDSCAPING OF THE VICTORIAN HIMALAYA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During his third expedition into the higher Himalaya in 1866, the most ambitious of his three journeys into the mountains, Samuel Bourne trekked to the Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganges. At that site he took “two or three negatives of this holy and not altogether unpicturesque object,” the first photographs ever made of the glacier and the ice cave called Gomukh, meaning the cow's mouth, from which the river emerges (Bourne 96). These words of Victorian India's pre-eminent landscape photographer, importantly, highlight the coming together of the picturesque mode and the landscape form through the medium of photography. In this essay, I focus on Samuel Bourne's images of the Himalaya, produced between 1863 and 1870, to query the ideological power of this triangulation to produce a specific image of the mountains in late nineteenth-century Victorian India. Situating Bourne's images in relation to contemporaneous material practices of the British within the space of the Himalaya, namely, the establishment of hill stations as picturesque locales in the higher altitudes of the Indian subcontinent, I argue that the landscape form, the picturesque mode, and the photographic medium, inflect each other to tame the sublimity of the mountains by representing them as similar to the Alps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".