Reproductie naar een foto, schilderij, tekening of prent c. 1860 - 1915

Curator: Take a look at this intriguing gelatin silver print, made somewhere between 1860 and 1915. The title is rather straightforward: "Reproduction after a photograph, painting, drawing, or print." Editor: The overall feeling is intensely focused and strangely claustrophobic, despite that overhead skylight. All sharp angles and hard surfaces except for the sleeves rolled up to expose those soft forearms of our anonymous craftsman, leaning so intently over his task. Curator: Yes, I’m immediately drawn into that gesture. He’s smoothing something out, preparing, attending. I find myself wondering about the original image. Is it someone’s likeness he’s painstakingly copying, or perhaps a grand landscape view that will be made pocket-sized through his efforts? Editor: The bicycle in the background introduces such a fascinating industrial era dynamic. That first wave of democratized transport meeting the demands to reproduce visual media for the growing population. It’s all progress but there’s something elegiac about it too. Almost biblical: dusty workshops, the faint outline of another man standing like a spectral guardian... Curator: I find myself contemplating what's been gained and what has been lost with the advent of reproductive technologies. Mass availability is incredible, but the singular focus of artistry becomes diluted when one image can become many with so little effort and expense. It certainly changes how we consume images. Editor: And our understanding of "authenticity." How do we experience images and art now, mediated by these technologies? The photographic negative, with its power to endlessly reproduce, contains such potent symbolic energy—simultaneously memory and creation. I agree. It feels complicated in our image saturated world! Curator: Agreed. Though on a visceral level I can still appreciate his intent concentration on what must have been very fiddly and laborious work! Each print pulled from those glass negatives would hold something of his skill, wouldn’t it? His hand becomes a kind of…printing press. Editor: Absolutely, and maybe it’s not about loss. But rather the evolution of a relationship to imagery and the birth of new possibilities. The past continues, remade within the future’s gaze. And here, standing before us, a quiet moment is recorded. Curator: That's beautifully put. Thank you. Editor: As always, my pleasure.