Vrijwilligers en matrozen aan de waterkant in Shanghai voor het diamanten jubileum van Victoria van het Verenigd Koninkrijk 1897

Curator: It looks like a memory fading – washed in sepia, almost ghost-like. A mass of figures, right? There's a solemn feeling... and something chaotic. Editor: Indeed. What we're seeing is W.R. Kahler's gelatin-silver print from 1897, titled "Volunteers and Sailors on the Waterfront in Shanghai for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee". It documents, perhaps unknowingly, the twilight years of British imperialism, doesn't it? Curator: Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee... Oh! Right, a display of British power in Shanghai then. Those gathered people – it’s difficult to grasp the scale, actually. Like a sea of faces all merging into one... It is ghostly, or maybe like a forgotten dream that never quite came true. Editor: Exactly. The scale is meant to be overwhelming. What’s particularly telling to me is the way it juxtaposes the celebration of the British monarchy with its staging ground in colonial Shanghai. We see this “Orientalist” lens flattening distinct cultural realities for imperial purposes, don’t we? Curator: Oh yes, there is that flatness! And those lines leading to the depths - towards nothing. Like something just running out... the tide receding, perhaps? Or the empire’s looming fall. I wonder if Kahler realised that's what he was doing! Editor: Whether or not the artist was consciously critiquing the empire is immaterial really, in my view, as what strikes me here, through that colonialist representation, is the historical moment. The city is central. You get the overwhelming sense that urbanization, maritime dominance, and empire building cannot be extracted from it. The cultural, economical, and the social— it is all there! Curator: Urbanisation eating at tradition, everything blurring... Yes, there's the story in there... hidden in plain sight like history loves to do. All this bustling - and fading! I can almost taste that particular sea air... salty, with something else bitter underneath. Editor: Absolutely, an ocean rife with layered and complicated implications. Thinking about Kahler’s choice to frame such an event from the periphery, capturing its quiet grandeur as much as the encroaching shadows, is fascinating to me. Curator: Thank you, I can now feel all of that - the "grandeur" and the shadows - more acutely, together and tangled in this captured, single moment in time.