Fotoreproductie van foto door Warren de la Rue van vlekken op de maan 1887 - 1888

Curator: I find myself immediately drawn to the stark contrast and almost tactile quality of this image. It's a gelatin-silver print from 1887-1888 titled "Fotoreproductie van foto door Warren de la Rue van vlekken op de maan". Editor: So, it’s a photograph *of* a photograph, and of the moon, no less. The levels of mediation already make me think about power and knowledge. What was the intent behind reproducing Warren de la Rue’s image? How was this new image consumed by the public? Curator: Those are important points. Given that the piece is attributed to Marinus Pieter Filbri, its context lies heavily within the history of scientific illustration and distribution. These images would have circulated as tools of education and documentation. It's a powerful example of how new photographic techniques affected labor distribution as it comes down to who had access and how they were going to control this access. Editor: Right. And considering this image would likely be distributed through scientific or educational institutions, it says a lot about who gets to look at the moon, and how. Before this, astronomical observations would be filtered through hand-drawn illustrations in books. Now photography brings a kind of indexical “truth”, a veneer of objectivity. Curator: I would argue it complicates it! The labour in the darkroom of producing a gelatin silver print should also be a critical area for analysis. While the image creates the aura of immediate transcription, we cannot simply gloss over that we are looking at photographic materials produced through various labour intensive activities. Editor: Agreed. Even just thinking about the silver itself! From where did that silver come? Who mined it? The colonial history of silver extraction would imbue a photo like this with its own politics of production. What seems at first to be simply a photograph of the moon holds all sorts of unseen material narratives. Curator: Exactly. This photogram provides an interesting avenue to explore historical relations between art, science and power relations which were then reproduced as photographic representations and distributed. Editor: It really brings our relationship with celestial bodies closer to the social and political realities back on Earth. Curator: Precisely. It's about grounding our understanding, bringing us back to the processes. Editor: It makes one look beyond the silver surface itself, quite literally!