Gezicht op Kapitool en omgeving te Timgad Possibly 1927

Curator: This gelatin-silver print, likely taken around 1927 by A.G.A. van Eelde, is titled "View of the Capitol and Surroundings at Timgad." It depicts the ruins of Timgad, a Roman colonial town in present-day Algeria. Editor: My first impression is a sense of monumental stillness, almost ghostly, preserved in the monochrome. The textures of the stonework dominate. Curator: Indeed. The stark black and white intensifies that feeling of timelessness, doesn't it? You almost feel transported to an ancient past, surrounded by the echoes of a once-thriving civilization. It evokes themes of the transience of power and the endurance of stone itself. Editor: Absolutely. I'm thinking about the labor involved – the quarrying, transporting, and shaping of all that stone. How the builders were integrated into a material, social world, not unlike our own, really, but on such a vastly different scale. Were photographs like this intended to bring back such historical context or simply aesthetic trophies for a colonial mindset? Curator: It's a layered question, I think. The artist likely sought to document these architectural relics. Gelatin-silver prints offered an incredible sharpness, a then modern clarity, capturing every detail of those ruins with remarkable precision. Yet there's undeniable visual weight: those standing columns carry deep symbols, pointing to the continuity of empire and maybe also to an elegiac lament for what has fallen. The two central structures act as totems on the landscape. Editor: Right, but who could actually consume the final product here? Gelatin silver prints in albums suggest an act of recording, preservation, even reverence… primarily for people of means, who are distant enough from that very real building process to aestheticize it in this form. Even today we’re speaking on it with such distance and reverence! Curator: That's the ongoing dance we have with these images, isn't it? They present an idealized perspective but contain an undercurrent of the messy realities of labor, social stratification, and ultimately cultural interpretation. Editor: Definitely. It all keeps me grounded in the physical realities behind even the most seemingly timeless image. Curator: Well, thinking about its historical setting and symbolic potential helps us access a deeper, almost mythological dimension within this photograph.