Röntgenfoto van (vermoedelijk) een portemonnee Possibly 1896

Curator: Well, this is striking! Before us, we have what's titled "Röntgenfoto van (vermoedelijk) een portemonnee"—that's "X-ray photograph of (presumably) a wallet" in Dutch. It's attributed to Capitaine Colson, possibly dating back to 1896, presented here as a print. Editor: There's a haunting quality to it, wouldn’t you say? Like peering into forgotten memories. It's shadowy, almost ethereal. It looks less like an everyday object and more like a strange kind of ghost story. Curator: Absolutely. And that "ghost story" element comes, I think, from the symbolic weight of x-rays themselves at that time. This wasn't just documentation; it was a peek into the invisible, the unseen interior. Look at the placement of the objects--knife, gear, and the wallet. Think of all the hidden things a wallet can contain: secrets, identification, money, little messages. To render that translucent transforms its meaning. Editor: Right! A wallet symbolizes identity, economic status, and perhaps a record of our recent personal history of expenditures, right? So an X-ray exposing the usually unseen contents creates, almost paradoxically, a new, more mediated kind of personal statement. The light here isn’t just revealing contents, it's casting new meaning on objects we are intimately linked to but hardly notice. I wonder about the artist's motivation? Was this about the thrill of technology or were they thinking more deeply about ideas around revealing and concealing the truths within things? Curator: And the artistic context shouldn't be discounted. Think about how the Surrealists would play with hidden meaning through photography. It feels like an early step toward manipulating reality, questioning the surface, and unveiling some underlying… something. Perhaps anxieties, perhaps curiosity. I feel an almost archeological dimension to it as if we are peering into a moment frozen in time. Editor: Perhaps revealing what our public and private selves might hold within... This exploration makes me rethink the cultural continuity that runs from Victorian fascinations to modern obsessions, like data tracking! We continue to seek, reveal, and interpret what is beneath surfaces of things. Curator: Yes! The hidden depths within even our most common objects... Editor: A ghostly image sparking so much!