Gezicht op Reims 1880 - 1900

Curator: Joseph Trompette’s albumen print, "Gezicht op Reims," made sometime between 1880 and 1900, offers us a distanced view of the city. Editor: My first thought is how melancholic it feels. The sepia tones and soft focus give it this ghostly, faded grandeur. Like peering into a dream, or maybe a half-remembered history lesson. Curator: Absolutely. And albumen printing, the process, played a large part. Using egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to paper. It's fascinating how something so… domestic… is used to create these lasting images of urbanization and empire. It’s a commercial technique making photographs easily reproducible. Editor: There’s this tangible sense of time passing, though, that seems woven into the very image. Thinking about all the labor that went into capturing this single shot, all the egg whites needed! I’m being frivolous but thinking about materiality is good. I like how it makes us realize this scene wasn’t instantly ‘posted’ or infinitely copied! Curator: Precisely! It forces a confrontation with consumption and value. How easily images circulate today, detached from the slow, deliberate craft. Consider how photographic technology advanced by 1900 with gelatin silver, a mass medium able to produce endless reproductions for a consumer market. Editor: All those perfectly straight lines in the buildings though! I am oddly drawn to that contrast between those crisp lines and the soft unfocused feeling I get overall. And I can’t shake the sense of solitude… almost like I’m the only one left in the city. Curator: Right! It makes one consider Trompette’s audience: middle-class tourists wanting a portable memento and perhaps feeling quite superior within an expanding world that depended on extraction and subjugation to maintain that order. This single photo embodies layers of economic relationships and visual strategies, even social values of the Belle Epoque. Editor: Seeing this image really makes me want to slow down and appreciate the fleeting nature of existence and creative intent, if I'm honest. Even just the ephemeral moment the photo catches and reveals something much bigger about industrial society. Curator: Yes, an industrial society on display in these processed prints! An economic force to be reckoned with and consumed. Thank you.