Stadhuis van Kopenhagen op het Rådhuspladsen 1903

Curator: Looking at this photograph, “Stadhuis van Kopenhagen op het Rådhuspladsen,” or Copenhagen City Hall on the Town Hall Square, created around 1903 by Geldolph Adriaan Kessler, you can feel the weight of history settling over the scene. Editor: Oh, it feels rather dreamlike, doesn't it? Muted tones, figures like hazy memories... it almost floats between realism and something ethereal. A city holding its breath. Curator: I find that quality particularly interesting given its public setting. Here's a major civic structure captured in a way that feels strangely private, introspective. The architecture dominates but the blurred figures, caught mid-stride, remind us that this is a space actively used and experienced. It is a study of civic pride versus lived experience in the capital. Editor: Yes! You get that contrast so palpably. Look at how Kessler stages them—those tiny figures by the benches! Like brushstrokes adding life to a formal portrait. They seem like phantoms, here today, gone tomorrow, their worries swallowed up in that grandeur, but are nonetheless part of it, without which the photograph falls flat, emotionless, and, as a work of art, it is unable to transcend. Curator: Precisely. Photography was still forging its identity as art then. While some photographers tried to imitate painting, Kessler embraces its specific strengths: capturing the play of light on surfaces, recording ephemeral moments. The twin images play together in our minds, forcing the perception of 3D, just like real sight does. This particular photograph uses this unique photographic device of duplication to underline the contrast and interplay between grand architecture and humble human interactions. It also served a commercial purpose: popular tourism collectibles, an opportunity to experience somewhere foreign. Editor: And isn’t it lovely that something so commercial can capture and contain a city’s soul like this? I imagine it's like taking a photograph of a poem or perhaps vice-versa? Curator: A beautifully succinct observation. Art and civic life intertwining through time... something that will live longer through photography. Editor: Art making our reality and ourselves endure a moment longer.