Josias Von Heeringen 1913

Nicola Perscheid made this photograph of Josias Von Heeringen sometime around the turn of the last century. It’s a portrait in sepia tones. There’s something very compelling about the use of light and shadow here, how Perscheid models the form of Heeringen’s face. The picture's surface is quite smooth, which lends a certain formality to the image, but if you look closely, the texture of the paper and the subtle variations in tone suggest a sort of controlled chaos, a dance between intention and accident. The way the light catches the medals, each one a tiny explosion of detail, pulling our eye across the chest, these are like abstract marks that build the structure of the image as a whole. It reminds me a little of August Sander, who was working around the same time. Both artists were interested in documenting the human condition through portraiture. Like painting, photography isn’t ever really about the thing being photographed, but about the process of making the image itself. The meaning is always fluid, open to interpretation.