Fotoreproductie van foto door Warren de la Rue van vlekken op de maan 1887 - 1888

Curator: This gelatin-silver print from the late 1880s, titled 'Fotoreproductie van foto door Warren de la Rue van vlekken op de maan' depicts—well, it depicts the moon. Though it's a photograph of a photograph. Editor: The image quality almost feels beside the point, doesn't it? It's kind of a ghostly echo rather than a crisp lunar landscape. Still… compelling. A bit sad. Curator: Interesting you say that, "sad." Because the labor involved… someone carefully re-photographed a pre-existing image to…reproduce it. Think of the darkroom, the precise exposures…for something already documented. What does it mean? Editor: It means labor. Slow labor, yes. Methodical. It speaks to the burgeoning mass reproduction facilitated by photography itself. An old tech made older still through the new. It's layered that way. You have this raw, immediate subject… the moon…mediated through this intense, very material, almost craft-like process. Curator: The very dark, almost roughly applied borders definitely contribute to that feeling. A sort of… enclosure, emphasizing the isolation of the moon itself and, perhaps, even humanity's early attempts at understanding something so remote. Editor: Exactly! It's easy to romanticize the celestial, but this is fundamentally grounded. Consider the chemicals, the paper… things extracted and processed. To bring the moon down to Earth. We own it, now... or at least its image. Curator: I agree there's that act of ownership. But I keep thinking about light itself, captured in shades of grey and sepia… like memories fading into abstraction, constantly reforming, resisting permanence, forever circling our periphery like… well, the moon. Editor: Right. This image shows me the labor and economy tied into creating something reproducible that purports a “one-off” unique encounter – gazing up at the moon, to then possess it. An endless loop of needing the original yet, like a fading signal, needing its copies and recreations more and more. Curator: Mmm. And from my side I suppose I feel that yearning. But knowing it is already lost. What an art!