Portret van twee onbekende meisjes before 1902

This photographic portrait of two unknown girls was created by Frédéric Boissonnas. It's printed in a book from who knows when. I feel for Boissonnas, working in a time when photography was still so tied to chemistry. Imagine him in the darkroom, carefully coaxing the image out of the ether, dealing with all those fumes and the precise timings. There's something alchemical about it, a bit like a painter mixing pigments. Look how the girls, dressed in matching white dresses, seem to float against the dark background. The grainy texture of the print gives it a dreamy, ethereal quality. They look like ghosts, or angels, caught in a moment of quiet contemplation, with only hints of the artist’s hand, a gesture frozen in time. Isn’t it funny how photographers and painters are always wrestling with light, shadow, and time, trying to capture something fleeting and real? We're all just trying to make sense of the world, one image at a time, bouncing ideas off each other, across the ages.