Tuin van operagebouw Kroll, Berlijn 1880

This photograph of the garden of the Kroll Opera House in Berlin was taken by Johann Friedrich Stiehm in the late 19th century. It shows an ordered space for leisure, with rows of tables and chairs beneath manicured trees and ornate lampposts. The Kroll Opera House, opened in 1844, was never a roaring success and served various functions over its history from opera house to parliament building. But this photograph gives us an insight into the way that cultural institutions offered spaces for socializing and promenading. The image is a carefully composed view down the central axis of the garden and an interesting study in perspective. To understand photographs like this, we can use a range of historical resources: archives of photographs and printed ephemera, newspaper reports of the time, architectural plans, and social histories of Berlin. The meaning of such images is always contingent on the cultural and institutional contexts in which they’re made and consumed.