High Street from College Open 1868

Curator: Stepping into this gallery, we encounter Thomas Annan's 1868 photograph, "High Street from College Open," a street scene of old Glasgow rendered in silvery monochrome. It's held here at The Art Institute of Chicago. Editor: It immediately brings to mind a half-remembered dream, perhaps from a storybook. There's something both immediate and dreamlike in how he captures the bustle of a street with such muted light. Curator: Indeed, Annan's work is celebrated for this unique combination. What draws me are those ghostlike figures. I wonder how much longer did it took him to photograph this scene, given the technology he was using? Editor: The blurred figures are so evocative. We might assume they're imperfections or a limitation of early photography, but I find the anonymity that blurs create fascinating; almost every street is the "everyman's street", full of universal experience and anonymous presence of the crowd. Curator: Precisely! These blurred figures also suggest temporality: it's not just *a* street, but the street in motion, in time, where a city breathes and lives and decays simultaneously, captured forever at a single intersection in time, between stone and air and life. Editor: There are many elements I recognize such as architecture. Take, for instance, the streetlights which are symbols of civic order. Then there's the architecture. So, I see history in every window, but not the clean history of documents but that kind that soaks into a space. Curator: In that sense, a symbol not just of external order, but internal order, perhaps, on what that kind of architecture signifies to someone on the street? As in what that period embodies to us as people still finding resonance between space and time, image and our consciousness... I think it asks a simple, important question about the collective consciousness of place... Editor: Absolutely, a photo of a time lost to time is never truly a photo of its time, is it? Curator: Not really. Thank you for shining new light and illuminating its place.