Portret van een onbekende man before 1900

Curator: Look at this gelatin silver print. This "Portret van een onbekende man"–Portrait of an Unknown Man–, predates 1900. The book has yellowed and faded, which lends it a beautiful sense of time, wouldn't you say? Editor: I agree, the aging process lends a certain solemnity, a wistful quality. His serious gaze, through those round spectacles, creates a really fascinating character! Almost beckoning across a long vanished time! Curator: Exactly! I find the image compelling precisely because its subject is *un*known. Who was he? What was his story? But the format within a printed book provides several interesting insights into photography in Germany during the nineteenth century! The photographer or photography studio of W. Weimer in Demmin seems worth searching! Editor: And what a marvel of detail from an antique gelatin-silver print. Observe the neat little bowtie against the background in a period dark-toned photograph, which might symbolize elegance but also restraint, perhaps hinting at the societal expectations placed upon him? The print medium seems somehow to both flatten the image while highlighting a bygone time of studio photography. Curator: That’s perceptive! The symbolism could definitely be there, and the unknown qualities also allow viewers to engage their personal symbolism too. I like to think he was a bit of a rebel, a quiet intellectual perhaps. I love to build an identity for him. Editor: I agree! And given the 'print' quality, perhaps the symbol I appreciate the most here might well be the medium, rather than the message... it is the printing processes themselves and the fonts, layouts, types that hold as much significance about this period of photographic artistic change. Curator: Ah, yes! The very fabric of our past, woven into a beautiful gelatin silver print, binding this individual to an early history of photographic practices! A past whispering secrets of both man and photographic printing, but encouraging each new generation to try to solve him! Editor: I agree - a wonderful little piece of printed ephemera that reveals hidden personal and aesthetic meaning.