Portret van een onbekende vrouw c. 1875 - 1890

This is an albumen print of an unknown woman, made in Amsterdam by Photographie Française. These photographic prints were made using a process that involved coating paper with egg white and silver nitrate. The technique emerged in the mid-19th century, making photographs more accessible to a wider public. Albumen prints like this one became incredibly popular for portraiture, allowing middle-class families to collect images of their loved ones in albums. The warm, sepia tones and smooth surface of the print give the portrait a soft, romantic quality, quite different from the sharp, high-resolution images we are used to seeing today. These were produced in photographic studios where many artists were working, involving labor and a system that allowed the image to be reproduced at an industrial level, tying in with wider social issues of labor, politics, and consumption. This small portrait, like so many others, speaks to the democratization of image-making in the 19th century.