Gezicht op Maison Pfister te Colmar before 1894

Curator: This is Charles Bernhoeft’s "Gezicht op Maison Pfister te Colmar," a gelatin-silver print created before 1894. Note the sharp details and subtle tonal range achieved through the gelatin-silver process. Editor: The photo makes me feel like I’ve stepped back in time. There's such an otherworldly, hazy glow to the cobblestone street. It has a ghostly but familiar quality that seems pulled from memory rather than strict reality. Curator: Precisely. Bernhoeft was a master of pictorialism, which favored atmosphere and evocative effects over clinical representation. Consider the way the light softens the building's angles and the cobblestones almost blend into a unified texture. Editor: Yes! And the angle is strange, slightly off. Like I’m walking on uneven ground, tilting into the view, and this reinforces that unstable, dreamy feel. Curator: It's about invoking a sensory experience, an idealized memory. His strategic placement of figures, almost blurred, enhances the scene’s depth and softens any sharp realism that would puncture the atmosphere. Editor: You can almost hear the clip-clop of horses or a faint snippet of street chatter. Do you think it was intentional or an accident that the human subjects are not really present but also central to this image of Colmar’s cityscape? Curator: Such blurring would certainly be a conscious aesthetic choice within pictorialism. It subordinates individual form to the overall impression and texture. The architecture then gains prominence but always in relation to its place as a marker in this fleeting, very temporal existence of the subjects. Editor: I feel myself drawn into the image. Maybe it’s the imperfectly defined shadows and almost dreamy sky that are captivating to a wandering spirit, something deeply romantic about bygone eras. Curator: Well, considering that the technique elevates an ordinary urban setting into an atmospheric encounter, one cannot separate content from process when trying to truly view this photograph. Editor: Agreed. It captures the soul of a place, or maybe, the photographer’s soul projected onto that place, suspended in time. It allows viewers to connect through imagination across decades. It will continue to bewitch those searching the shadows of nostalgia, I am certain.