A 1920s photo that takes the classroom outside – and us back in time

In two earlier posts, I wrote about the porosity of the boundary between outdoor and indoor photography in older photos:

1. some of the earliest landscape pictures were taken while the photographer was actually standing inside,
2. many ‘drawing-room’ portraits were actually taken in gardens,
3. many ‘out-of-doors’ portraits were actually taken in studios (we are now talking about the later decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th).

I just came across a photo from the early 1920s that gives another peek at these historical boundary crossings.

The photo shows a class of schoolchildren, probably reaching the end of their primary-school career. The pupils’ cheerfully relaxed faces suggest this was a happy class. Their teacher, Theo Thijssen, may have been a good teacher. (He is standing to their right, with, next to him, what may have been two assistants.) What I know for sure at least, is that Thijssen was a good writer. He even has his own museum now, which preserves this photo.

The children sit and stand in typical school-photo fashion, some on the ground, some on benches, I suspect. With one bench in the middle and one at the back, the photographer – probably a professional – created the tiered composition that we know so well of group photos, past and present. Also familiar is the fact that the few girls in this class were positioned symmetrically on the front row. And that clothes, such as the boys’ shirts and shorts, were taken into account when composing the group portrait.

Theo Thijssen’s group at ‘School no. 104’ in Amsterdam, 1921. Photo by unknown photographer, owned by the Theo Thijssen Museum Amsterdam, digitised on dbnl.org.

But two things struck me about this photo: things that point at the porosity between interior and exterior.

The first you will already have noticed.

The children are sitting and standing on a thick rug. Together with the two benches, these props will have taken some time and effort to set up. Perhaps, the photographer brought the rug with them in a van. Hopefully they received help from the children in carrying it to the appointed location. Luckily, the rug has some sturdy handles: something I had not seen before in historical collections or photographs. This was no decorative carpet, but a functional one. It enabled four boys in their Sunday best to sit on the floor for that perfect composition.

It also gives some unity to the composition and frames the focus of the picture: the children. However, the awkward slant of the rug relative to the edge of the photo, and the fact that it is cut off on the left-hand side but not the right-hand side, suggest that the photographer did not pay great care to use this opportunity well. What’s more, the street bricks would have offered a beautiful background as well – unless, perhaps, the carpet hides something that was visually unattractive, as well as unpleasant to sit on? A cellar grating? I am curious to read what you think!

But the rug has another effect besides. For what is that second noticeable thing?

In the 1920s, boys and men covered their heads when going out. Whether it was a flat cap, a woollen hat or a bowler, you needed something on your head, whatever the weather. It was simply the decent thing to do.

But on this photo, no one has a thread on their heads (except perhaps that one boy in the back row?). The class are pretending to be indoors! Not literally, of course: anyone can see that the backdrop to the photo is formed by the outside of their school building. Yet by picturing the children without coats or hats, the photo recreates the familiar atmosphere of a classroom. The rug, now, only increases this sense of warmth and comfort. The class have just been at their history lessons, the picture suggests, and will return to their own places at their desks in a second, once the photographer has given the ‘all clear’.

In the first instance, these things struck me because the boys’ bareheadedness was so unusual back then, and because carpets in outdoor photography are so unusual now. But really, they only bring these century-old schoolchildren closer to ourselves. Do not we go outside without a coat or scarf to have our picture with classmates or colleagues taken? And are not those photos carefully set up by the photographer who flies in for a day?

Is this what a historical sensation is: to feel you can step inside an old picture and find people who are just the same as you and I?

The earliest photos (2): outside in

In the previous post, I commented on the porosity of early photography: the parlour moved into the garden, the city into the home.

A reader sent me a photo of her grandmother which shows the same porosity.

Portrait of Tina Sangen and three other women, by Gerhard Mertens (early 20th century). Probably in the public domain. With permission of the owner.

The photo was taken in a studio: indoors.

It depicts four servants. The grandmother-to-be is the young woman on the right: Tina Sangen.

These four women lived and worked in Maastricht, in the Netherlands. Their portrait, however, was taken by Gerhard Mertens in Aachen, Germany. The distance is about 35 kilometres, which they would have travelled by train.

Gerhard Mertens had several studios in Aachen, and apparently had the reputation, the connections and/or the price to compete with the photographers that must have been available in Maastricht itself. Or perhaps the sitters did not go to Aachen specifically for Mertens’s studio: Aachen was three times the size of Maastricht, so the chances of getting a decent portrait done were simply higher there.

The back of the photo makes you wonder: are the negatives still being preserved somewhere, for new print orders?

Nevertheless, as the reader who sent the photo remarks, it is interesting that these four women made the journey across the border (which up until just before World War One remained pretty porous itself) to have their portrait taken. Partly, the trip must have been an outing, but it was also a work day, because the women are wearing their work costume and I don’t think they would have chosen to do so if this was a day they really had to themselves.

So what we are seeing may be a mixture of a proud employer* showing off their neat servants, and the servants getting a – hopefully paid – day out of the house, and out of the city. Evidently, the borders between work and leisure were porous, too – in terms of space as well as time.

But what also remained porous was the border between interior and exterior. The photo’s background shows a park-like landscape with full-grown trees. The foreground, on the contrary, a carpet and what looks like a very woolly rug. And on closer inspection, the background turns out to be painted.

This photo doesn’t really belong in the category of ‘early photography’, and it was easy enough for photographer Mertens to take pictures indoors. The outdoors clearly had its own charm as a setting – witness the painted trees. Yet at the same time, little effort was made to hide the fact that this scene was created inside a room – considering the carpet. Or perhaps the photographer really meant the carpet to evoke that traditional outdoor feeling established during the earlier phase of portrait photography?!

* Their employers were the family Pichot ─ Du Plessis.

The earliest photos: inside out

Yesterday, a generous friend gave me an enormous book: a big fat history of photography.

I had not anticipated that this already splendid book full of beautiful old photos, would also tell me a lot about that other interest I have: space.

One aspect of space that fascinates me, is the distinction between outside and inside spaces. Where exactly do we cross the threshold between being indoors and being out-of-doors? And where do we prefer to be?

Sometimes the distinction is clear. But this is far from always the case:

Tim Green, Kirkstall Abbey near Leeds (2016), CC-BY-2.0, on Wikimedia Commons.

Inside or outside?

Jürgen Sindermann, camp site Prerow on the Baltic Coast (1990), Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst, Zentralbild, Bild 183, via Wikimedia Commons.

Back to the history of photography. Very early photos, taken in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, seem to me to have frequently blurred the boundaries between inside and outside. This is visible in two types of photos discussed in the first chapter of my book.

1)  Most early photographic portraits follow the same pattern: the subject is seated or standing next to a table or column or such, against a simple architectural backdrop or curtain. All of this is placed – and this is key – on a nice, patterned carpet. In short, everything is done to suggest that the photo was taken in a comfortable drawing-room, or in someone’s study.

Portrait of Mary Ann Bartlett (1850 à 1860), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, DAG no. 1218.

However, not only were many pictures taken in professional studios rather than in the sitter’s home, and were those bits of furniture much too upmarket for some of them to even afford them. Many of such portraits were also taken in the open air. Especially amateur photographers often created their portraits out of doors. This could involve hauling quite a bit of furniture outside in order to create a miniature parlour. The amount of furniture is still modest on this example, but it shows clearly how such photos were made:

(Self-)portrait of Alexandrine Tinne in her own garden in The Hague (1860), Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands, Collectie 066 De Constant Rebecque, inventory no. 249 (public domain). Note the carpet. But also the saddle: Tinne was a famous explorer.

Photos such as these would later be cropped. Usually.

2)  A completely different genre was formed by cityscapes, an outdoor genre. Yet again, in early examples of this genre the boundaries between inside and outside were blurred. Out-of-door pictures were often taken while the photographer was standing indoors, working their camera through an opened window; or they were taken from the rooftop of the photographer’s house; or else, if the photographer did leave their front door, quite close to home.

They have that sense about them of a casual look out of the window, or of nipping out for a breath of fresh air on the doorstep.

Eduard Isaac Asser, view from his rooftop, Singel, Amsterdam (c. 1852), Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-F-AB12278-A (public domain).

That this is how early photography operated had two causes, I read in my book. For in order to take photos, you need two things:

1. your equipment: camera, tripod, plates, chemicals… In the early years, all this equipment was unwieldy and the process of making an exposure complex. It was best therefore not to venture too far from your studio;
2. of course, in order to take a photo you also need light. And in the early years of photography, with less sensitive materials than now, you simply needed more of this, so the best place to go for all kinds of photos was outside.

It was therefore in the nature of early photography to merge working outdoors and indoors. The very technology itself, which demanded both intricate equipment and a lot of light, turned these artists into amphibious creatures, who brought the parlour into the garden and the city into the home.

 

The first chapter of the book: Saskia Asser, Mattie Boom, Hans Rooseboom, ‘Photography in the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century: A New Art, A New Profession’, in Dutch Eyes: A Critical History of Photography in the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Waanders, 2007), 57-102.

Military gender-bending in 1848

This is a self-portrait by Adolf Dauthage.

Photo of lithograph (1848) posted on Wikimedia Commons by collector Peter Geymayer

Dauthage was a nineteenth-century Austrian lithographer. Working for the most part before photography became available, this means it was his job to draw portraits of high society, which could then be multiplied without limit using the new technology of lithographic printing, and serve as publicity material.

At the very start of his career as a portraitist, however, he drew himself (pictured here), as a soldier. And not just any soldier: this is the uniform of the Viennese Academic Legion, one of the many militia that were formed by students across Europe during the 1848 revolutions.

A contemporary from Germany described the Viennese students in his memoir:

They looked like a troop of knights of old.

Indeed the uniform can be said to express a very romantic masculinity.

Yet Dauthage’s posture subverts this masculinity. From under his feathered hat, he looks coyly out at the spectator. Add to this his tight waist, skirted coat, slightly stuck-out bottom, handkerchief (or single glove) in hand, the fact that he has kept his hat on (whereas men would always take theirs off indoors), and perhaps also his somewhat strangely positioned sabre, and his portrait reminds us more of the aristocratic and theatrical ladies he drew than of the statesmen and male artists:

Actress Friederike Gossmann, by Dauthage (1857). Wikimedia Commons.

General Ferdinand von Bauer, by Dauthage (1882). Wikimedia Commons.

Or, the ones drawn by his colleagues:

Lady Selina Meade Countess Clam-Martinics, by Thomas Lawrence (1835), photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

 

 

It is rare to see a man portrayed with his head bent down, looking up at the spectator. Especially a military man.

Perhaps this is all a figment of the imagination and we should look for the reason behind Dauthage’s posture in the history of self-portraiture: perhaps the coy look I saw is in fact the penetrating look of an artist looking at their own face in the mirror (think Rubens, Van Dyck… Gluck…).

Yet looking at the portrait naively, I felt Dauthage might be having a private cross-dressing party in his studio.

 

Quoted are The reminiscences of Carl Schurz (New York: McClure, 1907-1908.), p. 145.