BWW Reviews: India, Burma, and the Poignant Photographs of CAPTAIN LINNAEUS TRIPE

As both a traveler and a photographer, Captain Linnaeus Tripe had the gift of being in the right place at the right time. His career behind the camera began in the early 1850s, when he became one of the founding members of the Photographic Society in London. A fine start, but the work that he is remembered for took him well beyond the British metropolis and into the inner reaches of India and Myanmar (formerly Burma). On his travels through Asia, Tripe took thousands of photographs of temples, pagodas, carvings, and passages of sultry, lonely nature--images that, taken together, form a powerfully unsentimental portrait of a culture and a quietly ambitious testament to Tripe's photographic personality. Clear of contour, deep of perspective, Tripe's images are lucid records of landmarks and landscapes. For all that, they are also stirring, affecting, immediate: his open skies and scintillating foliage suggest a world enveloped in--or caressed by--a perpetual afternoon.

Tripe was a good, at times astonishing photographer. But great? By gathering roughly sixty of his images into a few uncluttered galleries, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has created a haunting but by no means definitive show. It is possible to leave Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma and still have no idea how much talent, all told, Tripe really had. Was he an effective cameraman who had the luck to find an eminently affecting subject, and to photograph it in ways nobody else had been around long enough to think of? Was he an unsung genius? (Tripe's photographic career, which proceeded under the auspices of the East India Company, was cut short in 1860. Budget problems.) Or did he appear too early in the development of photography as a form of art, if not as a form of basic documentation, for any of the usual standards to apply? Whatever he was, he has given curators Sarah Greenough, Daniel Malcolm, and Roger Taylor a body of photographs that emit a stern, stirring chamber music. It may be Tripe's, or it may be India and Burma's, but it suffuses the Met's latest study of the quiet power of photography.

The show starts, naturally enough, with a sampling of Tripe's nautical and military images from Devonport, England. These are conscientious and sometimes, in their incorporation of overriding pattern and aerial perspective, truly inspired. However, they don't really prepare you for the vacated vistas and brutal symmetries of Tripe's Asian explorations. Intricately carved arcades, scalloped rock faces, palm trees that seem to rise gingerly into the air and then evaporate, leaf by leaf--the sights Tripe captured, conspicuous and inconspicuous, couldn't be better.

Better still, India and Burma made Tripe into an innovative photographer, now of necessity, now by choice. Because glass negatives were poorly adapted to the humidity of Southeast Asia, Tripe produced his images using gold-toned paper negatives, a circumstance that gives an ethereal, lithograph-like effect to much of Tripe's corpus. And because he wanted to capture the inscriptions of the Brihadishvara Temple in southern India in their entirety, he used photograph upon photograph to generate a 360-degree continuous panorama. (The Met, in this show's only substantial disappointment, unfurls only a portion of this work.) The civilizations Tripe documented can feel older than the world itself, yet the way he documented them made photography--for one of the first times in its history--feel modern.

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