Gezicht op het Ca' d'Oro te Venetië c. 1880 - 1900

This photograph of the Ca' d'Oro in Venice was taken by Carlo Naya, probably sometime in the 1860s or 70s. It's a fairly straightforward albumen print, a process that was state-of-the-art at the time. But it's important to remember that even though this process seems automatic to us now, it was anything but back then. A tremendous amount of invisible labor went into the making of this image. Consider the harvesting of the raw materials, the industrial production of the chemicals involved, and then Naya's own meticulous work in preparing and printing the photograph. All that effort, captured in this single view of a building. Photographs like this one democratized access to visual culture, but they also depended on complex economic systems. So next time you see an early photograph, remember that it is not only a picture, but also an artifact of labor, trade, and technology.