Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art

Captain Linnaeus Tripe was a British photographer best known for the outstanding body of work he produced in India and Burma (now Myanmar) in the 1850s. Under the auspices of the East India Company, he took many photographs of archaeological sites and monuments, ancient and contemporary religious and secular buildings, as well as geological formations and landscape vistas that had not been seen before in the West. His military training gave his work a striking aesthetic and formal rigor and helped him achieve remarkably consistent results, despite the challenges that India’s heat and humidity posed to photographic chemistry. In this lecture recorded on September 28, 2014, curator Sarah Greenough discusses the 60 works that comprise the first major exhibition of his photographs, Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852–1860, on view from September 21, 2014 to January 2, 2015 at the National Gallery of Art.