Photographing Distant Lands and Vanished Kingdoms

The ubiquity of digital cameras and cheap flights has made photodocumentarians of us all, as well as dealers of instant nostalgia. It used to be that, in addition to walking uphill both ways, photographers of distant lands lugged dozens of pounds of cameras and equipment every which way, and developed their negatives (gasp!) with chemicals (with what?) in the “field” (the what?).

This drudgery is now largely myth (much like secretaries who write in shorthand), propagated by chroniclers of the few intrepid adventurers who braved photography’s inconvenience for its verisimilitude .

Janet E. and Frederick R. Wulsin, Jr., explorers with the National Geographic Society, were such mythical characters. Their photographs, a selection of which are on display in the Peabody Museum’s “Vanished Kingdoms: The Wulsin Photographs of Tibet, China, and Mongolia, 1921–1925,” are the soft, warm breaths of this dying breed.

TIBETAN LANTERN SLIDES

While analog photography may be a drag, the complications of the process give “Vanished Kingdoms” its distinctive quality.

The Wulsins, after their trek through inner Asia, outsourced many of their monochrome negatives to a workshop in Beijing. There, workers transferred the negatives to so-called “lantern slides” before coloring them in by hand.

Thirty-one of these hand-colored slides constitute “Vanished Kingdoms.” They document the Wulsins’ nine-month, 1,300-mile Central China Expedition for the National Geographic Society, with a focus on the people and architecture they met along the way.

Because of their fragile nature, the slides have been scanned and enlarged to the size of a splayed broadsheet for the exhibition. Alas, the digitization touches even the most obscure relics of the analog age.

The prints alternate irregularly between mere curio and sublime image. In the poorest cases, the half-photograph, half-paintings are off-kilter, stale, seemingly torn from the pages of a coloring book.

Naturalism in “Vanished Kingdoms” is as distant as Tibet: while the colorists may have been familiar with the places the Wulsins visited, the workshop was far, far away from the photographs’ referents. In addition, the slides have degraded in the last three-quarters of a century, and enlarging the slides has exaggerated the somewhat splotchy coloring that makes the otherwise impressive miniaturist painting seem careless.

RELICS AND ORNAMENTS

It is little surprise, then, that the photographs which sustain and reward lengthy viewings are those that shift the focus away from naturalistic subjects.

“Shamanistic mirror worn at exorcism festival” (1923) shows a large, round, ornamented, and polished metal mirror. Surrounded by swatches of a colorful robe, the bright, silvery-blue hue of the mirror is radiant. Rather than merely reflect the viewer—the mirror’s original purpose—the photograph offers a transcendent enchantment.

This soft glow, as if the print were lit from behind, is common to the most persuasive of the photographs. These works carry the exhibition and instill a sense of mild but persistent wonderment.

“Merchant’s family and young bride” (1923) is another captivating photograph. Four members of a Mongol family appear dressed in their finest pose outdoors, the young bride rearmost in a 2-by-2 formation. While the other faces are rendered in a murky orange-brown, hers is painted with snow-white makeup and cherry-red lipstick. Together with a shimmering light blue jacket, her brilliant image springs forth from behind her mother and sibling.

Tucked in the small alcove of the gallery are perhaps the two most enthralling photographs in the entire exhibition. Here, “Rural Tibetan kitchen” (1923) and “Tibetan apothecary” (1923) hang side-by-side, forming an informal diptych.

In the kitchen, a thin golden streak of light streams diagonally from a window in the top-right corner of the image. A window in the apothecary lets through light in the opposite direction from the top-left corner. Viewed together, the two shafts of light form an inverted pyramid that holds the two photographs in luminous harmony.

Both interiors are decorated sparsely and attractively, with multicolored accessories. The ornamentation embedded in the walls and the structural beams suggest that not only are these photographs of the same house, but also of two sides of the same wall, a possibility supported by the patterns of light.

BACK THEN, THEY HAD CAMELS

“Vanished Kingdoms” has traveled well in the past four years, making many stops (including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History) since the photographs made their public debut in 2003 at Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum.

Harvard’s Peabody Museum, which co-organized the exhibition with the Peabody Essex, is the show’s last stop, and it warrants a visit before it closes in early September.

If the walk there seems too long or too strenuous, just remember that the Wulsins’ cameras weighed several times more than your backpack. But then, again, they had camels.

—Staff writer Jeremy S. Singer-Vine can be reached at jsvine@fas.harvard.edu.