Coquina uit Saint Augustine before 1888

Curator: It's intriguing. The muted tones create an almost ghostly effect. A faded elegance, wouldn’t you say? Editor: Indeed. What you are looking at is titled "Coquina uit Saint Augustine" by Edward Bierstadt. This albumen print, made before 1888, offers a fascinating window into how places and memories were captured and presented. It's essentially an early form of photography, specifically, a still-life. Curator: Still life hardly covers it. The layering of shells immediately struck me. A large central shell containing text which reads, "A Old Saint Augustine US.A.," overlaid with the impression of fragmented shell pieces. It creates a sense of the ephemeral, of time slowly erasing things. Is the emphasis here place or memory? Or perhaps a commodification of experience itself? Editor: It's certainly playing with the idea of place, but it’s also very self-aware of its historical context. Consider, Saint Augustine was one of the earliest continuously inhabited European-established settlements in the United States. This photograph is tapping into that romanticized view of the ‘Old’ south, perhaps for tourism, or some other form of consumption by northerners. Curator: Absolutely. The title tells all. The composition is deliberately archaic, tapping into feelings of nostalgia for a simpler past, that may not actually exist. Editor: What's fascinating to me is the way Bierstadt is utilizing photography itself. By embedding photographic content in photography. In this period we see photography taking the place of painting in many ways. I find this composition particularly clever. He is placing visual art atop "A Old Saint Augustine". Is it a suggestion that photography captures the beauty of places, even better than other mediums can? Curator: You see this playing with themes of orientalism? Editor: Well, not so explicitly perhaps as we might find in his landscape painting, however the image employs similar strategies to those common with orientalism in photography. The photograph seeks to freeze and possess that idea of "Old Saint Augustine," the aesthetic presentation implies to an outsider that it might offer access. In a way the shell serves as trophy of this “Old” American place. Curator: Yes, now that you point that out, the seashell takes on another layer of symbolism—a souvenir from a lost Eden. It becomes a symbol of extraction. I wonder what modern eyes might make of it? Editor: Perhaps they’d recognize its layers of constructed meaning, this negotiation of past and present that still resonates today.