Captain Linnaeus Tripe (1822–1902) occupies a special place in the
history of 19th-century photography for the outstanding body of work he
produced in India and Burma (now the republic of Myanmar) in the 1850s.
Although he learned photography in Great Britain from amateurs who considered
it a pastime, he recognized that it could be an effective tool for conveying
information about unknown cultures and regions. With few models to follow,
Tripe developed a professional practice under the auspices of the large
bureaucracy of the British East India Company. Reflecting his military
discipline as an officer in the British army, he achieved remarkably consistent
results, despite the Indian heat and humidity, which posed constant challenges
to photographic chemistry. In addition, Tripe’s schooling as a surveyor, where the
choice of viewpoint and careful attention to visual details were essential,
gave his photographs their distinctive aesthetic rigor.
This exhibition traces Tripe’s work from his earliest photographs made
in England (1852–1854), to ones created on expeditions to the south Indian
kingdom of Mysore (1854), to Burma (1855), and again to south India
(1857–1858). Many of his photographs were the first to document celebrated
archaeological sites and monuments, ancient and contemporary religious and
secular buildings — some now destroyed — as well as geological formations and
landscape vistas; thus they provided a new kind of visual information. Yet the
dynamic vision Tripe brought to these large, technically complex photographs
and the lavish attention he paid to their execution indicate that his aims were
artistic as well.
Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with
the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhibitions/2014/captain-linnaeus-tripe.html
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