Portret van een onbekend meisje achter een stoel 1877 - 1885

Curator: What a wonderfully evocative piece. This gelatin silver print, created sometime between 1877 and 1885 by Jannis Jacobus van Melle, is titled "Portret van een onbekend meisje achter een stoel"—"Portrait of an Unknown Girl Behind a Chair." Editor: My first impression? Melancholy. The sepia tones lend it this beautifully aged quality, but it’s really the girl’s pensive expression. She looks like she's carrying the weight of a small world. Curator: Absolutely, and there’s such artifice in how these portraits were staged, which makes me question all this Victorian melancholy. Is it genuinely felt, or constructed? You know, how much control did this girl actually have over her representation here? Was this a family commission? Editor: It’s fascinating how photography in that era—a fairly new medium, right?—became almost instantly entwined with status and class. Her dress, while sombre, indicates a certain level of affluence. It is true that there were lots of photographic studies in 19th century looking at how photography helps to classify its objects into criminal, patient, etc... However the neutral background gives her a more intimate, internal experience that doesn't necessarily place her within one of these historical classes... Curator: Yes, she’s got that wistful, almost Pre-Raphaelite look to her, so yeah that places the work aesthetically rather than historically. This might sound weird, but I get the feeling this girl could burst out laughing any second. It makes you wanna give the picture a little shake just to see what comes tumbling out. A hidden smile perhaps. Editor: It is certainly tempting to release her to make a different decision, but doing so in practice requires an active and deliberate reading practice. Reading practices is to view subjects within the pictures of that time as more than props that were fixed... Instead as subjects with possibilities. Curator: Beautifully put. I also see possibilities when I look at her eyes, though the mystery is probably a big part of the allure. Editor: Absolutely. It allows for the projection of all kinds of feelings—an exercise, for me, in attempting to disrupt historical assumptions about women and representation, you see. To liberate a little, by reimagining. Curator: Reimagining can indeed be a liberation! Maybe all great art is actually just one huge, collective daydream... Editor: It is one we continue to actively reshape. Thank you.