Artist's Study: Charity, Seville

This quaint study, presumably depicting the distribution of charity on the streets of Seville, forms part of a larger body of work—of so-called Spanish "types"—which Alphonse Delaunay made between 1851 and 1854. The artist gathered people of various ages and diverse occupations, including this man and woman, to record a broad array of nineteenth-century Spanish life. The impulse to photographically document and classify physiologies and social appearances was inevitably entwined with imperialism, surveillance, and racial stereotyping, but the improvisational quality of Delaunay’s photographs (many of which he likely directed and posed) suggests that they initially were intended as source material for artists. The photographs are striking, too, for Dealunay’s playful use of the paper negative process; not only is the grain of the paper visible in the final print, but this granularity is also combined with an exaggerated blurriness. The resulting image has a dreamlike and nostalgic atmosphere.