Sit still and don’t laugh too much, according to photographer Arjan Verschoor’s instructions. It has everything to do with the shutter speed of the antique camera that is more than a hundred years old. As part of the new photo exhibition ‘I see, I see, what you don’t see’, visitors to the Stedelijk Museum in Coevorden can today have portrait photos taken as they used to be.
“Five, six, seven, eight”, Verschoor counts down the seconds. That’s how long the lens has to be open to catch enough light for the photo. “Sitting still, you know. Now I take the photo paper to the dark room to develop it,” he says to Rita Ottens and her daughter Britt (9) from Coevorden.
Ottens once had a lesson about developing photos at secondary school and wanted to know how such an old photo works. That’s why she signed up for the antique portrait photo at the museum in town. The photographer puts about fifty visitors on the old-fashioned, sensitive plate.
“There are all old photos here in black and white or sepia,” says Paulien Bakker of the Stedelijk Museum Coevorden. “You imagine yourself a hundred years back in time. At that time, taking a picture was very special. We want our guests to experience that today.”