Fotoreproductie van een portret van Augusta Victoria van Duitsland 1888 - 1921

Curator: Here we have a photographic portrait of Augusta Victoria of Germany, made sometime between 1888 and 1921 by F. Jamrath und Sohn, employing the gelatin-silver print method. Editor: What strikes me first is the sepia toning and overall air of faded gentility. There’s an almost ghostly quality about her, a woman captured but also somehow lost to time. Curator: The gelatin-silver process would have been relatively common at the time, allowing for mass production and dissemination of images. Think of it, in this way, as the early age of social media, capturing a ruler’s likeness! The "aged paper" look is, naturally, due to the passing of time. It’s created those earthy tones. Editor: Indeed! Looking closer, I'm curious about the labour that went into its production, particularly thinking about how it's housed in a family album alongside what appear to be more candid or personal images. To see a queen depicted among common folk, in a medium suddenly so accessible is an exciting collapse. It collapses hierarchical expectations, doesn't it? Curator: Absolutely. You're hinting at the democratization of portraiture. A queen, once only accessible through painted likenesses commissioned by the elite, now enters the domestic sphere through the reproducible image. Yet, observe her gaze - distant, perhaps melancholic. Editor: Yes, she is ornamented to excess, which in combination with her unsmiling visage almost evokes a sense of being burdened by representation itself, trapped in her constructed image. A fascinating intersection of visibility and constraint. The labor embedded here isn’t simply that of the photographic process, but also that of performing the queen’s prescribed roles. Curator: What this says is profound—a meditation on the price of power, and performance of persona in that context. But the intimacy also endures – a vanished breath, or secret only the picture now possesses. Editor: A great summation. As much as photography sought to immortalise, time, in a most charming turn, is still winning.