Portret van Sophia Frederica Mathilda, koningin der Nederlanden 1855 - 1870

This photograph of Sophia Frederica Mathilda, Queen of the Netherlands, was created by an anonymous artist. The image is a delicate artifact of early photographic technology. The photographer would have used a camera obscura, a dark room with a small hole to project the image onto a surface, to capture the Queen, before using a silver-based chemistry to create a lasting image on a metal or glass plate. This was an emerging technology at the time. The labor involved in creating such photographs would have been intensive, especially with the development of both the camera and the chemical processes required. The photographic process, in its time, was as much an industrial achievement as it was an artistic one, with implications for labor, politics, and consumption. It democratized image-making in some ways, while requiring new forms of specialist labor and expertise. This portrait testifies to photography's disruption of traditional artistic roles and techniques, and its entanglement with new systems of production.