The Raj at High Altitudes

By LEE LAWRENCE
Within months of its invention in 1839, photography had made its way to India, turning generations of colonial officers into amateur photographers. Among them was John Claude White, who served as political officer for the British Indian government for one year in Nepal and then from 1888 until 1908 in Sikkim, with occasional missions in Tibet and Bhutan. In all, some 200 of his works are known to have survived, just 17 of which are on display at the Rubin Museum of Art.


John Claude White's 'Glacier Head of Langpo Valley (Sikkim).'

In a museum largely devoted to Tibetan art, one cannot help but notice the absence of Mr. White's cityscapes of Lhasa or shots of southern Tibet. This is because, curator Becky Bloom explains, the photographs come from the collection of Pamela and Kurt Meyer, which doesn't include works from Mr. White's days in Tibet. For these images and those of Nepal, visitors will have to leaf through the Meyers's excellent book "In the Shadow of the Himalayas" in the gallery.

Another limitation Ms. Bloom had to contend with was that Mr. White's Bhutan photographs are part of a bound album. To get around this, the museum displays high-quality reproductions on the wall and the album itself in a case. These constraints notwithstanding, this small show succeeds in introducing one of the Raj's best amateur photographers, whose beautifully composed images combine aesthetic and documentary pursuits. In a photograph of the Glacier Head at Langpo, a dark range of mountains sets off the white splendor of the glacier—but look left and you will see a small human silhouette, which provides a way to measure the height of the ice.

'A British Life in a Mountain Kingdom'
Early Photographs of Sikkim and Bhutan
Rubin Museum of Art

In another, the choppy surface of the glacier at the source of the Teesta River rakes the foreground in concentric arcs, leading the eye between two mountains to distant snows. Beautiful, yes, but also political. One of Mr. White's duties was to survey the border between Sikkim and Tibet. Some in the Indian colonial government feared that expansionist czarist Russia would threaten Britain's hold on the region by infiltrating Tibet. A well-delineated border would confirm that Sikkim was part of the Raj—and the river was crucial to the border.

For all his photographs, Mr. White used a large-format camera (an 1895 example is in the show) that required a tripod and glass-plate negatives—it took three mules to carry his equipment during his arduous, months-long expeditions. The dry-plate process he used produces matte surfaces and a slightly sepia cast that softens contrasts. What the photos lose in vibrancy, they gain in texture and detail, whether capturing the intricately carved beams in a Bhutanese monastery or the frozen waves of a glacier in Sikkim.

Mr. White, however, chafed at the camera's limitations. Writing of the glacier in his memoirs, he describes "ice lakes of an exquisite turquoise blue, while the colours of the surrounding ice varied, as the sun's rays caught it, in all shades of deep blue, green, violet, and almost prismatic colours in places. … And my photograph cannot do justice, as it only produces the colour in shades of black and white."

He repeatedly expresses frustration, as though worried his photographs might add to misunderstandings about the region. Referring to the dancing Bhutanese monks he photographed in 1905, Mr. White writes in his memoir that their dance "is often incorrectly called devil dances. The masked dancers do not represent devils, but virtues and vices," he writes, comparing their ritual to the Miracle Plays of medieval Europe.

Mostly his photos of people corrected skewed impressions left by colonial predecessors and peers. Unlike those who posed natives to make them appear exotic, Mr. White takes them as they are. As a result, the show broadens our view of how colonial officers used photography in the British Raj.

—Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn.