Portret van een man in uniform 1905 - 1920

Pierre Le Breton Sr. made this photograph of a man in uniform at an unknown date. The sepia tones give it a feeling of looking back. Like a faded memory. I wonder what the man was thinking when he sat for this portrait. Did he feel proud, dutiful, scared? What was daily life like for him? How did he feel about being in uniform? Le Breton captured a moment of stillness. There’s something very tender about it. The way the light falls, the soft tonal range. It reminds me a bit of early modernist portraiture, where the focus is on capturing an inner state, a psychological essence. It’s easy to imagine that Pierre Le Breton would have been thinking about the relationship between light and shadow, how to render the textures of the uniform, and how to convey a sense of the sitter’s personality. As artists, we’re always trying to figure out how to translate experience, and how to use our materials to capture something real, something meaningful. We look back at past images like this one, and, somehow, we keep the conversation going.