"The Children Are Quiet When They Are Away"

At left is one of the most popular photographs in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What we are looking at is an idyllic summer day in the year 1910, a woman hastens to keep up with a little girl who has passed the crest of the hill and is on her way down the other side and out of our sight, as summer itself goes.

Here is what we know about these people. The woman is a British governess, Miss Mary Warner, and in her care is Edeltrude, daughter of Heinrich Kuhn, an Austrian photographer sometimes called the Viennese Stieglitz - but only by Americans. It is through the friendship between Kuhn and Stieglitz that this autochrome print came to the Met.
Heinrich Kuhn (1866-1944) was born in Dresden, Germany, studied in Leipzig and Freiburg, then migrated to Innsbruck, Austria, where he and his wife raised their four children: Charlotte (Lotti), Hans (Hano), Edeltrude, and Walter.
It takes a deliberate effort for us to see Kuhn's pictures as his contemporaries saw them: the rigorous concentration on form, elimination of unnecessary details, and the ingenuity of his technical innovations - things that we now take for granted.
We sense the gaiety of the intrepid little bandin their straw boaters, moving over hill and field, and wonder where the photographer was when he made these shots. Wanderers Seen Through The Leaves and Wanderers By The Trees (both from 1915) suggest that he may have been familiar with Felix Vallotton's Le Ballon (1899 - Musee d'Orsay, Paris).

Autochrome lends itself to romanticizing whatever it captures, but there is an unforced charm to Kuhn's images of family life, even the solemn regard with which little Hano faces the camera or the easy camaraderie of Edeltrude and Miss Mary as they sprawl in the grass.
The technical complexities and the deliberation that Kuhn brouoght to bear on producing his images result in the paradox of enduring freshness.