Max Liebermann Von Sonnenberg 1910

This is Nicola Perscheid's photo of Max Liebermann Von Sonnenberg. It’s a black and white portrait, full of soft tonal shifts and focused light. I wonder what it was like for the artist to have created this image. There’s a real sensitivity in how the tones of the face are treated. Look at how his expression is caught, something about the mouth… The artist must have been carefully watching, thinking about how to capture the mood of the man in front of him. I can imagine the artist thinking about what other artists might have been thinking when they made portraits: like, how do you catch that glimmer of personality? And it's something we can look at too, still figuring out how to translate human feeling.