strike the pose – defiance in imaging

“We encounter something new and strange… her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive modesty, there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art, something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in art.”  – Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography (1931)

Link: Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall, Newhaven Fishwife 1843-1846, by David Octavius Hill, National Galleries of Scotland Collection