Gezicht op een straat before 1899

Here's an albumen print photograph by A. Miethe, titled "Gezicht op een straat". It’s a view of a street, likely dating back to the late 19th or early 20th century. The albumen process, used here, was the most common form of photographic printing for about 30 years. It involves coating paper with albumen, the white of an egg, and then sensitizing it with a silver salt solution. This process created a glossy surface which captured fine details, as you can see in the architecture and the cobblestone street. What’s interesting about this process is that it essentially used a foodstuff, egg whites, to create an artistic image. In that sense, it sits at an interesting intersection of the domestic and the industrial, because albumen printing was itself a commercial practice. It suggests the huge amount of labor, from egg collection to darkroom manipulation, involved in producing even one image like this. Considering the material and the making gives us a richer understanding of the photograph, not just as a representation of a street, but as a cultural and economic artifact.