Portret van een man met een kanten kraag 1916

This portrait of a person with a lace collar was made by Guillame Maximilien Zimmermann. I wonder how they made it? Was it a daguerrotype, or one of those processes with a glass plate? Look at the light, how it’s kind of smoky? I can imagine the artist fussing in their darkroom, mixing up all those smelly chemicals. Do you think they liked doing that? Or did they just want to make pictures of people? I wonder if the sitter was nervous? They probably had to sit still for a long time, and try to look like they weren’t nervous! Maybe Zimmermann saw the pictures Julia Margaret Cameron was making, and thought, yeah, I can do that. Or maybe he was just trying to make a living. Either way, he was part of this whole conversation about how we see each other, and how we turn real life into art. It’s a conversation that’s still going on, every time someone picks up a camera or a brush.