An American elm before 1895

Curator: There's something quietly magnificent about this gelatin silver print, dating to before 1895. The artwork is titled "An American Elm," created by S.J. Eddy. What's your initial impression? Editor: My first thought? Nostalgia. It has that classic, slightly dreamy quality of old photography. The composition centers around this lone, majestic tree, a really stately sentinel sort of figure standing over a slightly blurry or out of focus field. The monochromatic palette almost creates a wistful or maybe contemplative mood. Curator: The artist, S.J. Eddy, was working within the pictorialism style, so that dreamy, almost painterly quality is quite deliberate. He’s using the photographic process, gelatin silver printing in this case, to evoke feeling and mood, prioritizing that over purely objective representation. What interests me are the labor conditions. You have an industrial printing process used to create "art", yet the human factor of "mood" is included to make it worthwhile. The gelatin and silver components that build to photographic quality also show its roots in commercial enterprise rather than simply art. Editor: Absolutely. I wonder, too, about the societal element. Consider the subject - the grand American Elm - what it meant symbolically at the time. Perhaps it stood for strength, endurance, even a kind of grounding national identity? Curator: It's easy to forget, especially with photography, the extent to which the artist has made choices about composition, development and presentation. Gelatin silver printing allowed for a high degree of control and manipulation of the final image which brings up issues related to photography and it's position to represent the objective reality of the elm or merely provide aesthetic qualities such as in this scene, melancholy. Editor: I do wonder about the unseen labour required. Imagine the sheer patience required, to be ready to photograph the right kind of landscape. Of finding, developing and refining gelatin silver printing that offers exactly the intended final impression. Now, it makes me look at the solitary American Elm once more from a newer more technical perspective and realize the importance. Curator: It definitely challenges easy assumptions about the relationship between labor, material, representation, and sentiment. Editor: For me too. This American Elm in a bygone print invites not only admiration of the image itself, but introspection about what makes it, and art generally, possible.