Gezicht op een meer en de Piz Corvatsch before 1899

Curator: This photograph, taken by Victor Selb before 1899, offers a stark, ethereal glimpse of a lake mirroring the towering Piz Corvatsch. Editor: It’s haunting, almost like a memory fading into the silver nitrate. There’s something inherently melancholic in its stillness. Curator: The process of gelatin-silver printing lends it that ghostly quality. Photography at this time was very labour intensive, using manual processes for each individual print, highlighting the social context of early photography as an emerging mass media format. Editor: Makes you wonder about Selb. What was it like hauling equipment up here? This vista speaks of a romantic sensibility grappling with the sublime. Curator: Early landscape photography was intimately tied to concepts of exploration and industrial expansion. This vista is not just a landscape, it’s evidence of claiming a terrain. Editor: True, and that glacier…a constant, icy reminder of the forces that shape and erode the land, and humanity’s role within that epic drama. Almost theatrical. Curator: Notice how the tonal range is crafted; look at how the artist harnesses photographic technology, using it as a tool for visual documentation of the landscape in ways that was never really possible before. Editor: I can imagine the long exposure… each mountain catching shadows with delicate precision. Selb, holding his breath, capturing the unspeakable silence of high altitudes. It’s almost religious. Curator: And yet, here the art speaks to labour too. How photography becomes instrumental within consumer culture to present grand landscapes of the world, offering a type of mass tourism we take for granted today. Editor: Ultimately, though, it remains evocative. A moment stolen from the immutable majesty, turned precious by its fragile rendering. Like a secret shared. Curator: Indeed, a glimpse into both a place and a process, intertwined by the conditions of labor, the development of technology, and material culture. Editor: And through the image, we gain access to this place as well, filtered through the eye of Selb. Another sort of materiality, that’s accessible forever.