Virabadra Drug as seen from near the site of the last view

Linnaeus Tripe

December 1857–January 1858 · Salted paper print from waxed paper negative · Photographs

Tripe was a career military officer in India and government photographer to the Madras Presidency in the late 1850s. Between December 1857 and April 1858 he made an ambitious and difficult tour of India's southern districts to create a record for the British colonial government of the region's antiquities, scenes of historic importance, and natural phenomena. Although the mission was documentary, Tripe often drew on European pictorial conventions as a way of organizing and containing this exotic new world. This view of the rugged landscape of the Salem district, with its vanishing mountains, soft shadows, and harmonious composition, would have appealed particularly to the nineteenth-century British taste for the picturesque.

Artist

Linnaeus Tripe

Date

December 1857–January 1858

Medium

Salted paper print from waxed paper negative

Department

Photographs

Credit line

The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Lila Acheson Wallace Gifts, 1997