Dwarsdoorsnede van aardlagen in het stroomgebied van de Seine before 1869

Curator: Immediately, I see strata—a geological, visual, and textual layering here. Editor: Yes, the muted tones lend a sense of timelessness; the composition, however, feels strangely…stark. Is that rock? Curator: Indeed. This is "Dwarsdoorsnede van aardlagen in het stroomgebied van de Seine," or, “Cross-section of soil layers in the Seine river basin,” a print created before 1869. I believe it’s an engraving. The processes to create the print—etching and pressing—would be quite laborious. And paper being, at the time, quite an active trade market. Editor: Laborious indeed! It invites a critical inquiry into whose labor extracted the very materials depicted here, from the earth to the ink to the paper itself, and the social conditions in the pre-industrial era in which the work would have been consumed. Were these images widely distributed? Or created more for specialized trades? Curator: We’re certainly looking at the burgeoning of geological science as a field. What I find striking is how an image like this becomes a commodity—information circulated, knowledge visualized. Editor: Absolutely, and whose knowledge? Early geology was, to some extent, entangled with colonialism – charting territories, extracting resources. What did representations like these enable, or make permissible? Curator: We see then not simply documentation, but the making of a very particular viewpoint on landscape and value. Even the way the layers are depicted suggests extraction and examination. Editor: A cross-section, like this one, certainly isolates. To extract not only the literal earth here for this engraving, but a visual fragment for study as well. I would say even now the impact is unsettling in that context. Curator: It forces one to really confront materiality. The engraving itself becomes a trace of resource exploitation and early methods of study. Food for thought on nature, industry, and image-making. Editor: Yes, it certainly calls into question the gaze that dispassionately renders geological formations. Layers of time and power.