Gevel van de Gouden Zon in de Lange Delft te Middelburg 1870 - 1900

This vintage photograph shows the “Gouden Zon” facade in Middelburg, captured by Léon & Lévy. Photographs like this one were made with a very particular kind of labor in mind. The wet collodion process was painstaking. It required not just artistic vision, but also chemical expertise and the skill of quickly coating and sensitizing the glass plate, exposing the image, and then immediately developing it before the emulsion dried. And of course, there was another class of labor on display here: the stonemasons, carvers, and builders whose efforts had originally created the facade. We can see how this building displays the civic pride of a bustling trading center. The photograph flattens the facade into a set of tonal relationships, and loses the haptic, three-dimensional qualities of the building itself. However, the photograph also allowed the image to circulate widely, as a postcard or in an album, allowing far-flung viewers to admire the fruits of the city’s skilled trades. So think of this photograph as a document of intertwined labor: the making of the building, and then the making of its image.