Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the national-history museum of the Netherlands, is making an increasing number of its collection items available online. Online museum visits have a lot of benefits (next to some important downsides!). One of these is that one item can be shown in combination with many different items, and used in many different thematic exhibitions at the same time. The same photo of Amsterdam can, for instance, illustrate urban history and the history of photography.* Using this idea, one Rijksmuseum curator has assembled a ‘Queering the Rijksmuseum’ collection, in which works ranging from early printed books to modern jewellery are shown alongside each other.
One of the items is this picture from 1871:
It was taken on a summer morning near a Bavarian salt mine: ‘Glück auf’ is a German miners’ greeting. According to the Rijksmuseum description, it shows two men, and we can see them carry what is probably a miner’s lamp. Are they two German miners in romantic embrace?
There are three noteworthy things about this photograph.
In the first place, of course, we see two men sitting very close together and looking comfortable. The picture reminded me of many of the photos in the recently published book Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love. And I agree with the Rijksmuseum curator that a case could certainly be made that the two people on the photo were intimately befriended. Check out the book if you want to compare notes: it is probably available in the Rijksmuseum library!
Second, that mine’s rocky facade looks suspiciously like papier-mâché. Also, the entrance is weirdly symmetric. And, most important of all, it would have been unusual for two miners in 1871, if they had the money to have a photo of themselves taken at all, to hire a photographer and pose with clean-scrubbed faces but still holding their miner’s lamp, in front of the entrance to their work. Much more likely, they would have arranged for a gentlemanly family portrait in their Sunday’s best, posing next to a Greek column or a vase. Or, if posing as miners, it would have been their employer who arranged for a photo to be taken of a group of workers, in order to promote their own enterprise.
You guessed it: the two figures are no miners at all, but tourists. According to the handwritten text on the photo they were ‘on the way to the Königssee’, a lake close to where the photo was taken. This text is in Dutch, so they had probably travelled from the Netherlands or Flanders, and were perhaps taking an Alpine trip of a few weeks.
What’s more, the photo itself was not taken in front of a mine, but in a photographer’s studio specialising in tourist snapshots. The studio was located close to an actual salt mine, but it was much more convenient to make these photographic souvenirs in front of a replica of the mine. We can only guess at whether the two tourists even saw the real mine in the first place. In many ways, tourism back then was already very much what it is like now.
Thirdly and finally, I wonder whether the mine is the only ‘fake’ on this photo. Here I enter the realm of speculation, I must add. But the picture does raise the question: were these tourists men at all? There is something in their oversized coats, the hat of the person on the right and the white pantaloons (with lobed edge) of the person on the right; something about their posture and the way they bear their head; the build of their shoulders, their face, and perhaps most of all the way their hair seems to be tied up – that suggests to me that they may have been female tourists masquerading as male miners.
There would not have been anything too remarkable in that: dressing up was a favourite middle-class pastime, and this occasionally included cross-gender-dressing. The moustache of the right-hand person, I must admit, would have been a bit more unusual to slap on. As I said, we are rummaging around here in the realm of the speculative. And of course there is a chance that instead, we see a feminine man or a masculine woman, with no sense of dressing up for the photo but a more enduring mixing of gender styles.
But the really remarkable thing, in case these really were two women, would be that they would be two women travelling together, possibly without men. Not unheard-of in the nineteenth century, but certainly less usual than all-male or mixed parties.** Which is of course what this couple could be as well: a ‘mixed party’.
Whichever way we bend it, all this confusion certainly makes this photo a valid example of a queer collection item in the Rijksmuseum.
Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, edited by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell. 5 Continents Editions, 2020.
* A downside of this practice of siloing visitors according to their interests, is that people are challenged less to learn about new topics. The integration of important themes such as homophobia or slavery into permanent exhibitions that all visitors get to see, might work better here. Also see the reservations that have been expressed about the Rijksmuseum’s temporary exhibition on the history of Dutch slavery that is opening now. Fortunately, the Rijksmuseum has announced it is also incorporating information about slavery into their permanent display.
** See my forthcoming book on travel and space in the nineteenth century.
Historian at large 