Café in de dierentuin van Marseille 1862 - 1876

Editor: This is a photograph, "Café in the Marseille Zoo," taken sometime between 1862 and 1876 by Jean Andrieu. It's a stereoscopic card showing what seems like an ornate gazebo or open-air structure. The light and shadow play across the detailed woodwork... it almost has a miniature or dollhouse-like feel. What strikes you when you look at it? Curator: The repetition of the image creates a compelling visual rhythm, but consider also the architecture itself. These airy pavilions speak to a specific desire, born in that period, to display and classify the natural world—a desire which projected itself through these ordered structures. Look at the delicate woodwork, almost lacelike, that still speaks to a time when even leisure was constructed to enforce a kind of civilized distance from "nature". Does it feel divorced from "nature" to you? Editor: That’s a great point, I see it now. The pavilions feel so curated, so deliberately placed, it’s as if nature itself is being put on display. But isn't a zoo supposed to be *in* nature, to some degree? Curator: Exactly. The image invites us to reflect on that paradox. The “zoo” promised proximity to the exotic but offered an experience mediated and sanitized through carefully constructed settings, so the pavilions acted as an architectural filter. In a sense, the artifice mirrors our own attempts to interpret and contain the wildness of the world, even the world in ourselves. Editor: This really gets me thinking about how even something as simple as a café design can reflect larger societal ideas. I hadn't considered the implied taming of nature in the photograph before. Curator: Photographs such as this give a small snapshot, literally and figuratively, into what that era thought of "wildness". Think how many layers are present just within those symmetries!