Portret van Marba en Eckart Titzenthaler, kinderen van de fotograaf

Waldemar Titzenthaler made this photograph, titled "Portret van Marba en Eckart Titzenthaler, kinderen van de fotograaf", using photographic methods rooted in his time. It’s an interesting portrait, a double portrait, and it feels more like a painting than a lot of photographs do. The surface is almost completely smooth, though you can imagine a trace of texture in the way the light falls across the faces and the fabric of their clothes. There’s something so tender and sweet in the tonal range, from dark to light, and the way the artist has captured a certain softness to the children. Look at the way the blanket pools at the bottom of the image. It reminds me of a baroque painting, where the folds in the fabric suggest dynamism and movement in an otherwise still scene. Like the work of Gertrude Käsebier, the image uses the conventions of portrait photography while at the same time hinting at other pictorial possibilities. It asks us to consider the still image as a carrier of time.