What makes you feel for a certain picture? Now when I’m participating in the choice of photos from the collection of Carl Curman for Flickr Commons on the Internet, I evidently find my own favorites.
The photos we choose to show should be charged with something special, both in appearance and in contents – directed to the international multi-million public that upload their own photos and/or visit Flickr to view, comment on or download other’s. A stream of photos is shown continuously and we want to present pictures that capture the eye. The photos should also be representative to the motifs of Carl Curman.
This photo in all its modesty is one of my favorites. It’s taken in 1862, in Fiskebäckskil on the Swedish west coast. A viewer on Flickr has made a commentary that the image reminds of a movie scene. Myself, I associate more to a painting, or maybe to a dream. I think it has a touch of surrealism, with the crinolines in the austere coastal landscape. A hazy veil on the photo gives an extra feeling of magic.
>> Anna Boman is a member of the Flickr Commons team at The Swedish National Heritage Board
A wonderful picture that really looks like a surrealistic paradox; people outdoor in the nature in extravagant dresses. But I think the picture quite well reveals the ideas of the time. In the mid 19th century people in the upper class discovered that it was healthy to be out in the open air, away from dusty ballrooms. Open air life became high fashion and the leading city planners thought it should be a democratic right to have access to green and healthy nature. London offered Hyde Park, Paris Bois de Boulogne and the most famous project was Central Park in New York, created 1860 and onwards. The well dressed bourgeois people in Fiskebäckskil 1862 had read their newspapers and wanted to be part of the modern world. With the lack of a specially built Central Park it was all right with a farmer’s meadow to show off the new international ideas.