Familie van Loentje Onnen rond een tafel in een tuin 1912

Curator: We’re looking at "Familie van Loentje Onnen rond een tafel in een tuin," or "Loentje Onnen's Family Around a Table in a Garden." It's a photographic work by Carolina (Loentje) Frederika Onnen, created around 1912. Editor: Oh, it feels so nostalgic. It's got this dreamy, soft focus, and a hazy light, like a memory half-forgotten. Are those two identical pictures side by side in the original presentation? It is somehow very interesting. Curator: That duplication certainly alters how we perceive it. Structurally, the piece engages with Pictorialism. Note the way Onnen softens the focus, emulating painterly effects within the photographic medium, and even in these seemingly unmanipulated framing of family portraits on an album, composition becomes another narrative tool. Editor: Exactly! They almost look like snapshots, yet there's such a constructed formality to the poses. That's very true of group portraits and family representations: spontaneity is a myth, because taking pictures and posing in front of them always change a moment of intimacy into one of public representation. They're striving to appear casually elegant, enjoying an afternoon tea, but the tension of maintaining that image is palpable to me, they look quite static actually. It is curious to see them reproduced side by side too, one is almost compelled to try and find small differences and mistakes between the pictures. Curator: The style seems to nod towards the genre painting traditions too; capturing a seemingly candid scene of bourgeois life, while in fact being meticulously constructed. It encapsulates the aspirations and anxieties of the Dutch upper classes at the time through its arrangement and artifice. It provides a potent statement about constructed image-making through mundane portraiture and family memorabilia. Editor: And I suppose that by being on the outside we become almost complicit of their representation, almost like judging how they decided to project themselves. You know, every photograph holds both a secret and an obvious truth, an event that cannot come back but a presence to behold indefinitely. It feels very intimate, but staged at the same time. I’d love to know their story beyond the still image. Curator: Precisely. Onnen’s photographic piece transcends its surface-level depiction, offering a complex exploration of representation and familial dynamics, its reproduction adds further conceptual value to this effect. Editor: It's funny how much one can read into a single captured moment in time! Thanks to Onnen for letting us do just that.