The Madame B Album c. 1870s

Editor: This is "The Madame B Album," created around the 1870s, and attributed to Marie-Blanche Hennelle Fournier. It’s an albumen print; a photograph carefully mounted. The image is of a cityscape, but I am struck by how the photographer chose to frame the shot, placing an agave right in the center! It makes me wonder… what are we really looking at? What’s most important here? Curator: Ah, it’s a landscape, certainly, but landscapes back then were rarely *just* landscapes. The rising popularity of photography coincided with massive industrial growth across Europe. A scene like this becomes a way of holding onto what felt like a quickly disappearing idyll. The added decoration reinforces this; a frame with flowers and birds which can read as the lost Garden of Eden. Don't you think? Editor: So, a kind of paradise lost? It does feel wistful… the soft sepia tones, the slightly faded quality of the print… Did photography play a similar role as painting had done for the Romantics a generation before? Curator: Precisely. Only here, you have the supposed objectivity of the camera—a mechanical eye offering "proof" of this pre-industrial Arcadia. Except, of course, every photograph involves a thousand subjective choices. Like the artist you mentioned… and where *they* decided to stand. The photographer placed this…almost desperate-looking plant directly between us and paradise. Maybe they feel expelled? Editor: Hmm. I hadn't thought of it that way. It feels very relevant, considering all the questions we have today about documentary photography and truth. Thank you. Curator: And thank you, you have helped me understand why the artist places a dark agave tree at the center of all that perceived peace and paradise!