Soldaten in hun vrije tijd 1948 - 1949

Editor: We're looking at a page from an album entitled "Soldiers in their Free Time," created anonymously around 1948 or '49. It features multiple albumen-print photographs of soldiers. What strikes me is the contrast between the images of leisure and what must be the context of their being there, perhaps war. What do you make of this combination, of this physical arrangement of images? Curator: What I see here is the material reality of military life abstracted into a consumable product – a photo album. These albumen prints, created through a chemical process that involved coating paper with egg white, fixing the image with silver nitrate, were not mass produced. This was clearly an artisanal process; photography in its early age. Consider the labor involved, not only in taking the photos, but also in printing them, and meticulously arranging them into an album. Who was this for and where did it travel to? Editor: So, beyond the soldiers depicted, you are interested in who made the prints and what was available in terms of photography at this time. Curator: Exactly. Think about the materiality of the conflict represented here, then translated into the chemicals, the paper, the glue that holds this album together. What stories do those materials tell, separate from the narrative presented by the images themselves? What's omitted here, for instance? Is there evidence of who originally owned the object in the form of writing on the interior boards or back? Editor: That really shifts my understanding of this album. It is not just a collection of memories but an object reflecting its own production. Thank you! Curator: Of course. Thinking about art through the lens of materials can be really illuminating.