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The legendary Bourne & Shepherd photo studio – founded in Kolkata (Calcutta), India – has sadly succumbed to the digital age after a storied history of 176 years. Bourne & Shepherd is considered the longest running photo studio of all time.

After shuttering the doors last Thursday, owner Jayant Gandhi, now in his seventies, explained, “Things are not the same anymore. Technology has changed and I have grown old.”

Some say the studio had it’s inception in the early 1860’s in Shimla as a partnership of British photographers Charles Shepherd, Samuel Bourne, William Howard and Arthur Robertson, but many historians date it back to 1840 when Bourne established his studio in the current location. The Wikipedia photo above by Biswarup Ganguly shows this building in Central Kolkata’s famed Esplanade Row.

The Wikipedia image below, credited to Bourne himself, is a portrait of Bourne taken in 1862. At around that time his work was exhibited throughout Europe and at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1867.

Much of the early work of the studio is preserved in the Smithsonian, at London’s National Portrait Gallery, and in the Cambridge University Library. Bourne and Shepherd became known as preeminent chroniclers of the British past and received the Kaiser-i-Hind medal in 1911 for public service in India.

The studio suffered a terrible fire in 1991 during which over 2,200 glass plate negatives were destroyed. The studio subsequently changed hands several times until it was purchased in 1955 by Jayant Gandhi. The Wikipedia photo below, credited to a photographer by the name of Pramanick, shows the Gothic structure of the four-story building as a Heritage property.

Via The Hindu