Portret van keizer Frans Jozef I van Oostenrijk before 1905

This photograph of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria was made by an anonymous artist, and it's full of the kinds of subtle details that, as an artist, I find endlessly fascinating. Look at the way the tones shift across the image, it’s all about light and shadow playing on the surface. The light seems to highlight the Emperor’s face, drawing attention to his slightly furrowed brow and serious gaze. I like that the artist chose to show him in profile, it is a formal pose, but also somehow very human. The texture of the photograph itself, you can almost feel the paper, and how it must have felt to sit for a photograph in those days. It makes me think about the relationship between photography and painting, how each medium influences the other. Think about Warhol and his photo-booth portraits, or Gerhard Richter's blurred photographs that he turns into paintings. It's all one big conversation, with artists borrowing and responding to each other across time, isn't it?