Portret van een jonge vrouw 1860 - 1899

This is a portrait of a young woman by Mozes Cohen, made sometime in the mid-19th century. It's a photograph, but not just any photograph. It belongs to a specific type of image-making called an "albumen print." This process, popular in the 1850s to the 1890s, involved coating paper with egg white – yes, that’s right, egg white – and then using it to capture a photographic negative. The result is a sepia-toned image with a distinctive, slightly glossy surface. Think about the labor involved: collecting, separating, and applying all those eggs! The albumen print was part of a broader shift towards mass-produced photography, making portraits more accessible to a growing middle class. While not as labor-intensive as hand-painted portraiture, it still required considerable skill and care. Looking at this image, we can appreciate it not just as a depiction of a person, but also as a record of a particular moment in the history of image-making, when craft and industrial production were closely intertwined.