Gezicht op de Leeuw van Luzern 1860 - 1900

Editor: This is Giorgio Sommer's "Gezicht op de Leeuw van Luzern," taken sometime between 1860 and 1900. It's a gelatin-silver print photograph of a sculpture, and I'm struck by how the image captures this interplay between the artificial and the natural. What do you see in this piece? Curator: I see the meeting of industry, labor, and remembrance. Sommer's photograph doesn't just document the Lion Monument; it subtly reveals the monument’s existence as a product of extracted materials, sculpted through considerable labor. The raw rock face, partially obscured, hints at the material origins and the extensive effort required to carve this romantic symbol of Swiss Guards. Editor: So, it's less about the artistic merit of the sculpture itself and more about the physical making? Curator: Exactly. Consider the Romantic style tag; it disguises the industrial effort. The gelatin-silver printing process itself - a fairly new technology then - enables the wide distribution and therefore consumption of this imagery, blurring the lines between art, commodity, and memorial. We consume a romanticized past, literally printed on a medium born from industrial chemistry. Editor: I see, it's like the photograph makes the grief of the event a product. Is the small figure on the bench part of this too? Curator: In a way, yes. The figure becomes a consumer of the spectacle, placed within a landscape rendered photographically, distanced from the original event. It brings attention to the ways that we perform grief. It brings a focus to the industry that forms and reinforces cultural ideals through repeatable photographic processes. Editor: That's a really interesting way to look at it. I never considered photography itself as being part of that process, too! Curator: By analyzing the materials, labor, and mode of consumption, we start to unveil the complex ways memory and meaning are manufactured. It also reveals photography’s impact during its time as an industrial process and emerging art form.