Portret van een man met een baard c. 1860 - 1880

Curator: Here we have "Portret van een man met een baard", or "Portrait of a Man with a Beard" by James S. Bayfield, dating from around 1860 to 1880. It’s a gelatin-silver print photograph. What’s your first take? Editor: Ghostly! In the sense of a bygone era, of course. The sepia tones evoke something Victorian… melancholic, perhaps, as though this man holds a world of untold stories in his gaze. Curator: The gelatin silver process was key in the rise of portrait photography around this time, because it vastly reduced exposure times. Think about how much labor and cost was reduced just by harnessing this chemical reaction. Editor: It makes you wonder, though. Did he want his picture taken? I’m getting the sense he would much rather have been tending to his own business, maybe having a cigarette, but he knows portraiture is the "done" thing. Curator: A signifier of class, to be sure. He's consciously consuming a service that requires highly specialized skill and access to costly materials like silver salts and cameras, something a man of the working class would certainly not have access to. Editor: Absolutely. But there's also something about the softness of the focus, and how he is slightly blurred that makes him seem so immediate to me. Curator: True. There’s a vulnerability there. A fleeting, arrested moment in time. One might look at it now and think of millions of other photos like it from that period... but this portrait tells of a story, a place, and time. It’s the unique perspective of one man presented using new tools, but also following well-established formal compositional guides. Editor: I keep thinking of my grandfather... I guess photos have a knack of bringing the past into sharper focus, of connecting you. It reminds me of a bittersweet kind of love for things past.