An entirely new Photographic Memories is running through January 17, 2010. Curated by Qamar Adamjee, largely from the Ehrenfeld Collection, with informative captions tracing individual photographs and their context.

Original Exhibition

An exhibition organized by scholar Bob del Bonta from the Ehrenfeld Collection of early photographs from India, China and Japan in San Francisco California from March 13 until August 30th 2009.

A rare opportunity to see Indian images in the context of other Asian 19th century images.

Opened on March 26th in San Francisco by the new Director of the Asian Art Museum, the photoraj correspondent reports a large turnout at launch. A number of Indian images are included, but especially fascinating are a series of hand-colored images of Beijing mounted behind a glass panel. As Bob Del Bonta himself discovered, they lent a 3-D cast to these spectacular images of the Beijing Summer Palace. The mammoth-sized images featured portions of the Palace apparently not there any more.

This display highlights the museum’s holdings of historical photographs collected by the late San Francisco surgeon William K. Ehrenfeld. Bob del Bonta gas meticulously researched individual images, which already at this early stage in photo history, assumed unique national styles and characteristics.

[From the official site]

The images on view reflect lives people led in Asia, record the travels people took there – or would like to have taken. Among the well-known photographers represented are the Englishman Charles Shepherd, the Indian Lala Deen Dayal, and the Japanese Tamamura Kozaburo.

The subjects range from formal portraits of princes to picturesque views of palaces and temples to depictions of dancers and tightrope walkers in mid-performance. The majority of the 36 works on view document life in colonial India. The remaining works feature China and Japan as their subjects. The photographs date mostly from 1850–1910, with some dating as recently as the 1940’s. Photographic Memories is housed in the intimate Tateuchi Thematic Gallery located on the second floor of the museum between the Korean and Japanese galleries.