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Exhibition at Met: Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852-1860
Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852–1860 is the first major traveling exhibition of his work and will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 24 through May 25, 2015.
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 Myanmar) in the 1850s.
Tripe was a photographer with the eye of a surveyor and the
sensibilities of an artist, a telling combination that sets him apart from
others of the period. The exhibition of approximately 60 photographs traces
Tripe's work from his earliest photographs made in England
(1852–1854) during an extended leave from his first deployment in India, to those created on expeditions to the
south Indian kingdom of Mysore (1854), to Burma
(1855), and again to south India
(1857–1858).
It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with the Victoria
and Albert Museum,
London.
Originally from Devonport, England, Tripe joined the British
East India Company in 1839. Although he spent several years in India on
assignment as an officer of the 12th Madras Infantry, it wasn’t until he
returned to his hometown on leave in 1851 that he learned photography. When he
returned to India in 1854,
he photographed throughout the country and Burma,
at first on his own initiative and later under the auspices of the Madras
Presidency—a British administrative subdivision covering much of southern India—when he
was appointed their photographer in 1856.
Tripe quickly recognized that photography could be an effective tool for
conveying information about unknown cultures and regions. Drawing on his army background
and training, he possessed the vision to understand how to develop a
professional practice under the auspices of a large bureaucracy—the East India
Company and the British government.
Tripe worked during a time of great change; the Indian Rebellion of 1857 caused
the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British government,
making India part of the British Empire. However, Tripe’s pictures provide little
evidence of that revolt, as he remained largely removed from the fighting.
Instead, he made some of the first photographs of celebrated architectural
sites—temples, palaces, and forts—as well as natural landmarks in Burma and
throughout the large south Indian province of Madras, creating pictures that
cogently revealed to the West aspects of those countries’ art, culture, and
religion. During his time in south India, Tripe generated more than
290 large-format negatives, a total of 17,745 prints, 30 of which will be on
display at the Met. Also featured will be a 21-part panorama recording the
inscriptions on the outer walls of the Great Pagoda at Tajore, which was hailed
at the time as “a noble triumph of photography.â€
With his military discipline and order, Tripe managed to achieve remarkably
consistent results, despite the stifling Indian climate where heat and humidity
were constant challenges to photographic chemistry. And with his training as a
surveyor, where choice of viewpoint and technical ability were essential, his
photographs are distinguished by their aesthetic and formal rigor, which gives
many of them a distinctly modern character.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York
http://www.metmuseum.org/