Twee mannen in Volendamse klederdracht lopend op een dijk c. 1900 - 1910

Curator: What a poignant stillness in this image. It's a gelatin silver print, "Twee mannen in Volendamse klederdracht lopend op een dijk", placing two men in Volendam attire on a dike, likely captured between 1900 and 1910 by G. Hidderley. The monochrome is striking. Editor: The flatness is remarkable. It’s almost suffocating – like the heavy sky is pressing down on them. Makes you feel a bit seasick, like the world is tilted. Curator: Yes, and that flatness is a deliberate aesthetic, symptomatic of the era. Photography like this documents social realities, fixing and framing people and locations, becoming crucial for social and ethnographic records, especially to observe clothing manufacture. The choice of gelatin silver—a relatively new and cheaper material than older photographic methods—made photography much more accessible to a wide range of artists. Editor: Do you think they knew each other well, these two? They are close and it makes you feel melancholic, perhaps longing. I’m drawn to their identical coats – mass produced perhaps? The wind in their robes makes them appear as if they're floating a little. It feels deeply personal. Curator: Quite possibly factory produced clothing for that era, considering photography was booming with a similar boom happening in clothing and accessory trades. Think how such mass-production facilitated the emergence of popular culture and the shift in visual language… photography was used to document these events of mass-scale labor. Editor: Thinking of them having that commonness and ordinariness actually warms the melancholy to acceptance – there's beauty even here on the cold dyke and the way that they are just themselves within that. They carry some beautiful unknown secret between them and that connects to you despite their simplicity. It's weirdly hopeful for such bleak light! Curator: Agreed, it reflects its place in the larger machine of turn-of-the-century social observation. An insightful piece overall and an intriguing intersection of craft and manufacturing. Editor: Precisely, a simple photograph that, like memory itself, is both perfectly captured and hopelessly clouded.