ART REVIEW : A VINTAGE ADVENTURER’S LENS ON THE ORIENT

SAN DIEGO —  Not so long ago the news noted that Alf Landon had turned 99. That gentleman had the distinction of losing the 1936 presidential race to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but even had he done nothing, it’s getting to be news when somebody is a century old. Age confers a certain patina on both people and objects.

When it comes to objects, there are those who argue that age alone is enough to turn an ordinary work of craft into a work of art. The point is moot, but if it has validity anywhere, it’s probably in the world of photography. The veriest cliche tintype portrait takes on a certain magic just because the flimsy thing has survived, and if the subject is interesting, it’s also touching, because we know that beautiful girl or dashing fellow has long since turned to dust and cobwebs. Old photographs have a particular ability to evoke mortality and are thus both poignant and a trifle suspect. They make it too easy to confound death with art.

This is worth thinking about because an ever-present stream of vintage photography is cresting around here presently. On Thursday, the County Museum of Art will present “British Views of India,” including some photos. Three exhibitions devoted to the art of Julia Margaret Cameron are all open at the Getty Museum, UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. And San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts houses an absorbing scan of the photos of John Thomson until Oct. 12.

Thomson is not precisely a looming figure in the history of photography, and part of the point of this show is to provide an opportunity to see if that circumstance needs correcting. If anybody had heard of him at all up to this point, it was probably for his 1877 essay “Street Life in London.” With a detailed text by Adolphe Smith, the work was a milestone in the use of photography for sociological ends. The pioneer American reformist photographer Lewis Hine was only 3 years old when Thomson made this work.

It is included in San Diego but it’s clearly not the point, since the show and the handsome Stephen White monograph illuminating it are both called “A Window to the Orient.”

For 10 years beginning in 1862 the Scottish-born Thomson traveled the Far East from Siam to Cambodia and China, stacking up a visual record undoubtedly praiseworthy for the venturesome spirit, survival skill and intelligent curiosity it represents. You don’t have to read White’s text to sense adventure lurking behind these pictures.

In Siam, Thomson gained an audience with the king (of “The King and I” fame) with the hope of taking a portrait. The king capriciously marched off as Thomson was about to shoot. When the photographer took off after him, a prince said, “If you accost him now, he might conclude the morning’s work by cutting off your head.”

Thomson kept his head, eventually got his shot and a myriad of others of Balinese dancers, Cantonese gamblers, an Anamite nude and all manner of panoramic landscapes and dwellings, from encrusted temples to thatched hovels.

Thomson kept his head in most circumstances, although he did take a year off to marry Isobel Petrie, a resourceful woman who accompanied him on his travels and bore several children.

Thomson kept his head through bouts of malaria, and while becoming acquainted with the ways of Chinese beggars and criminals. He photographed them while learning about their pilfering practices. When a robbery was committed, the victim went to a detective and offered a reward. The detective went to the robber and negotiated the return of the goods, splitting the reward with the robber.

Thomson always kept his head when photographing. The works are crisp, well-composed descriptions of their subjects. In a work like “Travelers Palm” it is clear that he had some of the attributes of an abstract formalist. They also display an almost anthropological detachment and a surprising lack of romanticism and emotional clout, considering the exotic surroundings.

They reflect the European epoch’s fascination with encylopedic classification and typology. Thomson was in some ways a distant predecessor of the German August Sander, but he rarely concentrated hard enough to gain Sander’s psychological clout.

Finally settled back in England, Thomson became a member of the Royal Photographic Society and made formal portraits of people and interiors. He was a gifted and likable explorer and recorder whose work (like much photography) is better studied sitting down with a book that standing next to a gallery wall. The work is absorbing, informative and historically significant, but not even time has given it the capacity to move us.