Portret van een jongeman c. 1863 - 1892

Jacob Hohmann made this portrait of a young man, likely a photographic print, in the mid-to-late 19th century. Before the age of inexpensive, mass-produced photography, portraiture served to commemorate social status. The young man here is formally dressed in a suit and bow tie, a signifier of middle-class respectability. Studio photography like this arose as a bourgeois phenomenon, and catered to the aspirations of an emerging middle class to possess images of themselves in the manner previously reserved for the aristocracy. His gaze is direct, but he betrays little emotion; this is a social performance. It is in such images, mass-produced for the middle classes, that we can see the consolidation of a modern idea of the self. As historians, we can learn about the social history of 19th-century Europe and America by looking at collections of formal portraiture held in public archives. The way photography democratized portraiture also transformed social relations.