Suikerfabriek 1890 - 1910

Curator: This photograph, titled "Suikerfabriek", comes to us from Otto Hisgen and is dated to sometime between 1890 and 1910. What's your first reaction to this photographic print? Editor: It feels... melancholy. Something about the muted tones, the stillness of the water, even the plume of smoke feels heavy. Like a forgotten memory clinging to the landscape. Curator: Hisgen's work exemplifies Pictorialism, a late 19th and early 20th-century style which often employed soft focus and printing techniques to achieve effects that resembled painting or drawing. It aims, perhaps, to elevate photography to the level of high art. Do you see that here? Editor: Absolutely. There's this painterly quality to the light and shadows that almost obscures the harsh reality of the industrial scene. It romanticizes the architecture through soft gradients of light; it’s undeniably beautiful, though slightly detached. The factory becomes a character. Curator: Consider how the composition is arranged. We have a central mirroring in the still waters reflecting a facade of the white buildings, an anchoring tree mass balancing the industrial chimney. Editor: Right, and the mirroring almost creates this sense of doubling, like we are seeing two worlds at once—one real and one reflected, a stable construct. The geometry is interesting with its use of perpendicular verticals with train tracks heading toward the eye—the use of the Golden Mean at play in the landscape layout creates a balance of depth within a static reality. Curator: But the reflection is subtly distorted, offering a dreamlike quality—and disrupting any kind of absolute formal resolution. It prevents an absolute, definitive reading of the image's depth and purpose. What kind of stories do you suppose lie inside its structure? Editor: The whole thing has a narrative stillness... as if this photo captures a pregnant moment of expectation on what can happen when sugar gets refined in quantity and gets into the populace, and that plume of smoke becomes a sign of changing landscapes and an uncertain future. Maybe it even whispers of an old-world order gradually changing to modern capitalism? Curator: Interesting. It certainly encapsulates an interesting convergence of art and industry during a period of massive socio-economic transformations. Thanks. Editor: It's been a joy! And perhaps prompts us to think a bit more on how past technologies and techniques can reflect a world moving far away and far forward!