An exhibition of photographs from India, China and Japan at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, California offers a rare opportunity to see images from all three of Asia’s photographic innovators in a single room.

While most of the 36 photographs are from India, pride of place is a glass case along the main wall of colorized images of Beijing’s Summer Palace in the late 1920s. The crisp colors are breath-taking.

“The interplay of color and light do make them appear three dimensional,” curator Bob del Bonta noted in the hurried minutes just before the show opened on March 26th 2009. He went on to give an informed lecture on the photographs, some from the Ehrenfeld Collection, others like the Chinese ones from the collection of Avery Brundage, the museum's original donor and a man with a good eye for Asian art well before it became so popular.

Later, when things have calmed down, one notices on the other side of the room, in a glass case like a samurai sword, an open album of Japanese photographs. Most of them are in color too. Both East Asian countries seem to have had a richer mass tradition of colored photographs than India did.

Or was that really the case?

Hand-colored photos were similarly popular in South Asia, as one of the first works on Raj photography Through Indian Eyes made so abundantly clear many years ago. Sepia and black and white were European preferences. In Asia, color ruled.