Nobel chemist Karplus’ photos on display at Boston College

“Martin Karplus: Memories and Monuments” presents 55 of that chemist’s photographs. It also has a display case with Karplus’s equipment. A 35mm Leica was his DSLR of choice. The show runs through Dec. 7 at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art. Karplus, who died last December, donated 134 digital prints to the McMullen shortly before his death.

Born in Vienna, in 1930, Karplus fled the Nazis with his parents and brother in 1938. The Karpluses were, to use a term currently disreputable in certain quarters, refugees. The family ended up in Newton. Yes, even then its public schools were attracting educationally aspirational families.

Karplus went on to Harvard, Caltech (urged to go there by no less a figure than J. Robert Oppenheimer), and Oxford. Then began a career of teaching and research that took him to the University of Illinois, Columbia, Harvard, and, eventually, an awards ceremony in Stockholm.

Nobelists write a biographical sketch for the prizes’ website. Karplus’s is well worth reading. One sentence is pertinent to the McMullen exhibition. “During my two years in Oxford as a postdoctoral fellow, I spent much of the time traveling throughout Europe and taking photographs.” Many are in the show — from England, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria, France. His absences from Oxford would seem to have been time very well spent.

There are also photographs from Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Hong Kong — yes, Karplus got around — as well as, closer to home, the American Southwest, Illinois, New York, and Sudbury (the Martha-Mary Chapel).

Karplus used Kodachrome slide film. This is notable because Kodachrome produced a particularly rich, even saturated color. This lends these images a real vibrancy. Multiplying that vibrancy is the fact that back in the 1950s and early ’60s, when Karplus took these pictures, color photography was rarely employed by “serious” photographers. Among the reasons for that were the instability of color, making it dubious in one way, and the association of color with advertising, making it dubious in another. So seeing color images of scenes like these is novel, even slightly exotic, and lends them a rare sense of immediacy and vividness. Memories fade. These colors haven’t.

But there’s that word “serious.” Karplus, for all his obvious enthusiasm for the medium and his subjects, was an amateur, literally so; and these are tourist pictures — again, literally so. Along with that enthusiasm, though, there was real skill. The first photograph in the show announces his artistic ambitions. It’s a self-portrait Karplus took on a Danish ferry, his image reflected in an MG hubcap as if it were a convex mirror. He uses a more subtle version of automotive trickeration with a photograph of three Serbian women in traditional dress. Look very carefully and you can see that he took it through his car’s windshield.

Every once in a while, Karplus gives in to theatricality (a look down at the showily lit lobby of the Guggenheim Museum), a touch of the cutes (a toddler’s tininess juxtaposed with the massiveness of Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace), or touristiness (a view of Chinese junks in Hong Kong harbor).

Those pictures stand out because Karplus is so consistently artful and consistently unobtrusive in that artfulness. One notices certain stylistic preferences. He likes presenting people in frieze-like arrangements, as in a marvelous 1960 shot from Rio de Janeiro (which is also a very elegant study in horizontal picture planes) or one of schoolgirls walking down a Roman street. Note the chromatic juxtaposition of lavender skirts and Creamsicle-colored facade. Sometimes he takes this frieze approach to objects, too, as with a set of deck chairs on a French ocean liner.

Karplus has a happy penchant for placing blocks of color within the frame. Next to the line of open deck chairs is a stack of folded ones, the stacking and folding accentuating their being red. There’s the way the skirt of one of those Serbian women is a rectangle of orange-red. Or there’s the red coat of a woman standing in front of the Grand Canyon, though that’s easy enough to overlook at first since it’s the Grand Canyon she’s standing in front of.

These are photographs of both people and places, but people matter to Karplus more. He clearly responds to them. He also responds to there being a lot inside the frame. A shot of Brasilia under construction is striking but feels anomalous because of the empty space surrounding Bruno Georgi’s famous “Os Candangos” sculpture and Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court Palace in the background.

Many of the hangings being nicely complementary, it should be noted that the McMullen’s John McCoy curated.

MARTIN KARPLUS: Moments and Monuments

At McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2101 Commonwealth Ave., through Dec. 7. 617-552-8587, artmuseum@bc.edu

Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.