Burton Holmes. Travelogues. The Greatest Traveler of His Time 1892-1952

Before television, before the glossy travel magazine, before the word content meant anything at all, there was Burton Holmes standing beside a lantern projector, narrating the world to Americans who would never leave their own state. He named the form. From 1892 to 1952 he crossed the planet again and again and brought back hand-colored slides and, later, motion pictures, and he called the results travelogues because he needed a word and none yet existed.

The TASCHEN book draws on an archive of tens of thousands of images and leans on the hand-tinted lantern slides, which are the real revelation. Long before Kodachrome, color arrived by brush: a colorist laid transparent washes over the black-and-white positive, guessing at the true hue of a Kyoto kimono or a Moroccan wall. The results sit in an uncanny register, documentary in their detail and dreamlike in their applied color.

The range is the genuine marvel. He filmed in Japan and Russia and the Philippines, rode the first automobiles and the last horse caravans, and kept going through wars and upheavals and the arrival of the very medium, cinema, that would eventually make his lantern act obsolete. The book compresses six decades of that motion into a single loosely chronological sweep, and the cumulative effect is of watching the whole planet shrink inside one man's lifetime.

Holmes was a showman first, and the pictures carry the showman's habits. He favored the postcard vantage, the recognizable monument, the composition that would read from the back of a darkened hall. There is little of the restless formal experiment that his contemporaries in the art-photography world were chasing. What he offered instead was reach: a competent, endlessly curious, relentlessly cheerful eye pointed at more of the world than almost anyone then alive had seen.

He was also a shrewd businessman, and it colors the work. The lectures sold out for decades because Holmes handed audiences comfort along with wonder, a world that was strange but never threatening, narrated in the reassuring diction of a well-traveled friend. The pictures were chosen to please a paying room, and that commercial instinct is both why the archive grew so vast and why so little of it unsettles.

Seen now, the framing dates. The commentary that once accompanied these images traded in the easy exoticism of its era, and the camera often treats people as scenery, one more picturesque feature of a foreign view. The collection is honest enough to let that show instead of sanding it away. What survives the dated attitudes is the documentary residue, streets and ceremonies and ordinary transactions that no one else was recording in color at all.

The interest for a working photographer is partly technical and partly cautionary. Technical, because the tinting is a master class in how color can be a decision instead of a recording, a hue chosen for effect long before film made the choice automatic. Cautionary, because a career built entirely on showing people what they already expect to see has a short half-life as art, however well it succeeds as spectacle.

Picture the darkened hall again, the projector's fan, the audience leaning toward a glowing wall of somewhere they will never go. The book is that room, reassembled on paper. What once played as live wonder now reads as a record of how the modern appetite for elsewhere was first fed, one hand-colored slide at a time.