Portret van een onbekende man before 1903

Curator: This is a photographic portrait by Otto Scharf, made sometime before 1903. The medium is listed as collotype, gelatin-silver print, and print, so there seems to be a layering of techniques and materials at play here. Editor: The first thing that strikes me is the intensity in the eyes of this unknown man. There is a Victorian severity but softened around the edges by the tonality. I get a strong sense of him. Curator: Layered photographic processes can create that kind of ethereal feeling, but the real power of the portrait is in the way the modernists were eager to reclaim the idea of a kind of “inner truth” through likeness. To find an individual through technical, mechanical processes. Editor: Interesting! What about the role of craft here? Was the modern desire for inner truth paradoxically enhanced by the materiality of photography, the very physical and chemical process of capturing and developing a likeness? The collotype is a key component; it allows for that softer focus, I imagine, and offers more subtle gradients. Curator: Absolutely, and I'd argue the sitter's very bourgeois presentation— the suit, the grooming—conveys not only a likeness of someone, but something about that person's position, class, aspirations within the world. The photographic portrait gave a broader swath of society access to that sort of symbolic representation. Editor: I see that. A symbol of belonging but also striving? It really brings together both what photography made possible and who could seize its possibilities at the time. Curator: And who was granted visual permanence. Photography gives a sense of cultural memory to what would be unrecorded otherwise. A moment of light and gesture memorialized. Editor: So well said. The process is what helps us now understand how lives were considered with new depth.