1496
made from wet collodion negatives in 1855, and he
showed his photographs at the various photographic
societies in England and Scotland as well as the 1857
Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition and the 1862
International Exhibition. He also exhibited at the 1855
Paris Exposition Universelle and the 1856 Brussels
international photography exhibition. A member of
the Photographic Society, he served as its treasurer.
In the late 1850s, his subject matter consisted of rural
scenes, rivers and streams, fi elds of crops, and close-up
views of vegetation, often in Surrey. He also exhibited
some photographs of sculpture. In the early 1860s, his
subjects included Welsh landscapes. His best-known
photographs include “Hunford Mill”;, “ Surrey”; “The
Lledr Bridge, near Bettws y Coed”; and “The Cornfi eld.”
His work is found at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Getty Museum,
among others. He died in 1903.
Diane Waggoner
WHITE, JOHN CLAUDE (1853–1918)
John Claude White, Companion of the Indian Empire
(CIE), was born on 1 October 1853 in Calcutta, the
son of a British doctor in the Government of India.
Educated at the Royal Indian Engineering College,
Cooper’s Hill, England, he entered the Government of
India as a civil engineer; photography was his vocation.
In 1883 he was assigned for a year to the British Resi-
dency in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he photographed
Nepal’s architecture and monuments. Named political
offi cer in 1889, he moved to Gangtok, Sikkim where he
oversaw British interests in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet
for nearly 20 years. He carried his camera everywhere,
photographing the Himalayan mountains, architecture
and people. A member of the 1904 British invasion of
Tibet, he was the only expedition member permitted
to photograph Lhasa’s monasteries. He made fi ve trips
to Bhutan, photographing its architecture and the 1907
coronation of its fi rst king. His landscapes, glaciers,
and architectural studies form a remarkably compre-
hensive documentation of important events in the
history of the political development of the North-East
Himalayan Frontier. His photographs were published
by the studio Johnston and Hoffman: Sikkim (1902),
Bhutan (1905–06), and Tibet and Lhasa (1908). His
writings, including his memoirs Sikhim and Bhutan:
Twenty-one Years on the North-East Frontier 1887–
1908 (London: Edward Arnold, 1909) and three articles
in National Geographic Magazine illustrated by his
photographs opened the window on the Himalayan
region to the west. In the Shadow of the Himalayas:
Tibet-Bhutan-Nepal-Sikkim, a photographic record by
John Claude White 1883–1908 (Mapin, 2005) contains
over 100 of his photos, including his best known im-
age, a panorama of 1904 Lhasa. He died in London
on 19 February 1918.
Pamela Deuel MeyerWHITE, JOHN FORBES (1831–1904)
English photographer
A miller, art collector, and amateur photographer, John
Forbes White was born in Aberdeen, the son of a fl our
miller, and was educated at Marischal College in the
city, where he fi rst met Thomas Keith with whom he
would take many of his photographs in the 1850s. Be-
tween 1854 and 1858, the two men travelled extensively
together with their cameras. They married sisters, Ina
and Elizabeth Johnston, the cousins of Sir James Young
Simpson.
Like Keith, from whom he had learned photogra-
phy, White used Le Gray’s waxed paper process for all
his known output, and his subjects ranged from local
views around Aberdeen and the Balgownie estate near
the family’s fl our mills, to views in Central Scotland,
Northern England, and North Wales. By the time of
his interest in photography, he was running the family
business, and it was the pressure of that responsibility
which prompted him to abandon photography in 1859,
the year of his marriage.
His photographic output consists of little more than
eighty large paper negatives, many of them never printed
until very shortly before his death.
White’s work remained unseen for over forty years
until James Craig Annan printed several of his negatives
and displayed them to critical acclaim at the Glasgow
International Exhibition of 1901 alongside images by
Thomas Keith, and by Hill and Adamson.
John HannavyWHITE, MARGARET MATILDA
(1868 –1910)
Margaret Matilda White (1868–1910) emigrated to
New Zealand from Belfast with her family in 1886.
She was a friend of John Robert Hanna, a skilled
Irish photographer who conducted a very successful
portrait business in Auckland. It is thought that this
friendship resulted in her acquiring skills as a pho-
tographer, which she demonstrated while working as
a ward sister in a Mental institution. Her job provided
her with subject matter that was very challenging
because of the psychological undertones that the im-
ages invoke. She later married and moved to the West
Coast of the South Island where she continued to use
her camera to record her life and times. Because of her
premature death in 1910, there isn1t what one would
call a very extensive fi les of negatives to draw upon