Runderen tussen palmen 1887 - 1910

Curator: The sepia tones of this photograph create a feeling of stillness. Editor: Yes, the high contrast is definitely evocative. This is “Runderen tussen palmen” or "Cattle among palms" by G. Lekegian & Co., dating from somewhere between 1887 and 1910. It is a gelatin silver print. Curator: The image feels archetypal. Palms, especially date palms, have symbolized victory, eternal life, even fertility in numerous cultures spanning millennia. Their repetition here, almost like an infinite grove, amplifies that sense of enduring promise. Editor: Interesting to bring up the palms' symbolism. For me, though, I am particularly interested in the process by which the image was made – the physical act of exposing light-sensitive gelatin to render such precise details from this orientalist setting. The sharp definition and tonal gradations belie the cumbersome process behind a late 19th-century photograph like this one. Think about the conditions the photographers and their local assistants were working under. Curator: Precisely, these photographs reinforced a European colonial worldview. Exoticizing "the Orient" for consumption back home was very deliberate. Even the composition funnels your eye into the grove with a couple of indistinct, and I suspect deliberately, pastoral figures in the middle ground. Editor: But consider what it also preserves. Gelatin silver was a relatively stable medium. This object’s survival, what it allows us to reconstruct of photographic techniques in that place and at that time... those details offer insight into the economy surrounding image-making and image-consumption then. Curator: True. The choice of subject still communicates established visual tropes from Orientalist painting, influencing assumptions about place and people. It is powerful stuff, all these interwoven symbols and material evidence, reinforcing some stories while simultaneously erasing others. Editor: A fascinating tension to hold. The weight of the finished object as historical and cultural artifact versus its technical, mechanical origins. Curator: Definitely. It prompts thinking on the way photography participated in creating our understanding of certain places. Editor: And appreciating the technology of its making as an art.