Portret van Olga, Marba en Eckart Titzenthaler, echtgenote en kinderen van de fotograaf 1915

This is a photograph by Waldemar Titzenthaler, of his wife and children. It’s a formal portrait, but the baby’s crying, which introduces an element of chance, a kind of glitch, into the image. The composition is very frontal, the subjects posed in an oval shape. Titzenthaler is clearly interested in the tonal range of black and white photography, playing with the light and shadow on the figures' faces and clothes. Look at the way the light falls on the mother's dress, creating subtle variations in tone. The two children seem to have very different characters. The mother is at the center, literally and figuratively holding the family together. But the baby, with its screwed up face, is the most compelling element. It's a reminder that life is messy, unpredictable, and often not very photogenic. The German photographer, August Sander, also made portraits of his family and peers in the early twentieth century, creating an important body of documentary work. Like Sander, Titzenthaler reveals the way a photographic portrait can be both posed and naturalistic, both a constructed image and a record of a particular moment in time.