The art of painted photographs arose out of a need for 19th-century artists to compete with commercial photography. The ROM has the largest representation of Indian painted photographs in North America. Embellished Reality features 50 works never before exhibited. Unlike the West, where photography replaced painting as an accurate reflection of "reality," in India, photographs were used to enhance the function of paintings, which were seen as a reflection of a higher realm of existence, or "hyper-reality."