Portret van een onbekende baby 1891 - 1912

Curator: Standing before us, we have a gelatin silver print titled "Portret van een onbekende baby," dating roughly from 1891 to 1912, by Friedrich Carel Hisgen. Editor: My initial impression is one of a gentle solemnity. The soft focus and the monochrome palette create a nostalgic, almost dreamlike atmosphere around this unknown child. Curator: Absolutely. Placing this within its socio-historical moment, we can view it as an exploration of burgeoning class and societal expectations surrounding childhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Consider the baby's attire, perhaps symbolic of aspiration and careful upbringing within a burgeoning consumer culture. Editor: The careful attention to dress is striking. This outfit is like a protective, knitted shell, almost infantilizing—visually marking this little person’s vulnerability and dependence but then there are the little shoes. Curator: These studio portraits played a crucial role in shaping how families, particularly within specific socioeconomic strata, wished to present themselves and their children to posterity and to their own communities. There is this constant and difficult performativity of gender even in infancy, made strikingly visible by what appears to be the baby’s own awareness of being watched. Editor: Indeed, there’s a weight to those eyes, isn't there? Babies are so linked to potential, hope. Perhaps in the photograph, Hisgen inadvertently immortalizes the cultural anxiety about what this new life, in all its guileless promise, will inherit from and bequeath to society. Curator: I agree. This photo encapsulates a fleeting moment loaded with complex cultural narratives, reflective of class aspirations, parental anxieties, and the objectification of childhood itself. Editor: Looking at this little person now, from a future they never knew, reminds me of how our understanding of what makes someone important can change radically in just one turn of the historical wheel.