The Horse Trainer
Short Takes » Photos » Félix Thiollier » The most enigmatic photo ever made?
1899. The end of the 19th century. The trainer? Most likely his daughter Emma.
Below: The best example of this image I was able to find, before I began restoring it by hand in Adobe Photoshop…
I was scrolling through some of the Yellowstone Open Parks Network images a few weeks back, and on exiting their site, one of those opportune little serendipitous events occurred. This image cropped up just before I cleared the URL search string I initially conjured up.
I was reminded of finding a much smaller one around a year back. I loved the image. It is, to me, the most powerfully enigmatic photograph of the entire 19th century. This one was 12.5 by 12.5 inches, but was scanned at 72dpi. Even so, it is roughly three times the size of last year’s find. But…the image was simply an enlargement from what seems to be a very isolated antecedent image, a digital predecessor which was originally, probably, a much older scan replete with almost textbook digital artifacting. All of which just drives me crazy when I see the same artifaction pattern all the time in relation to this image, in all of it’s appearances online which I’ve seen.
The one that popped up out of the blue yesterday seemed at first glance to be from another antecedent image. Thiollier’s work is known to be very smooth, sound tonal values, while these scans I am continually seeing are very mottled. This could be due to the fact that it may have been one of the few examples of a classic photograph from that era but made on the fly, although I doubt that.
It could be that the original negative was damaged, perhaps by mold, for in places in this image, from this same lineage, here is evidence of that being the case. Again, I hope not.
My guess is, indeed my hope is, that I’ve just yet to come upon a copy of the print which was expertly scanned, and we will all see the image above replaced by a much more beautiful representation of Thiollier’s work. I did finally find one late last night which is a bit higher quality, and I’ll be working on it today to see if it seems to be of a different strain of a later scan.
I’ll post it above in the place of this image, with comments on why it my—or may not—be better. I‘ll try to locate the one I first saw over a year ago and post it below, in a third position, adding a few more words to describe what digital artifacting is, where it springs from, and how it compounds over time.
And while this image is, in so many ways, redolent of the old American West, and certainly seems to have fooled the AI prompter last night as it appeared on closure of my Yellowstone OPN search, it was not made in America.
Thiollier was a French artist, former businessman, who lived in France his entire life. There seems to be much I need to learn about this man, and his daughter, who seems to have been his favorite Muse.
“Lady and horse on a snowy day” is often seen as the alternate title for this work. I have a strong suspicion that Emma preferred “The horse trainer.
More to come…
The Met Museum:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/289070