The Kiss, Terre Haute, Ind.

Tender embrace between the Reynolds sisters Jean and Marion — and not a romantic couple, as the image has sometimes been mis-catalogued. Made in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1904, the platinum print stages the two sisters in a quiet horizontal embrace, faces almost touching, the upper body of one against the bent head of the other, in a soft Newark-style interior light. The work is emblematic of White's American pictorialism in its refusal of the staged-couple narrative that filled commercial salon photography of the period: the subject is sororal intimacy, not romance, and the formal restraint of the composition — a single light source, a tight chest-and-shoulders crop, the platinum tonal scale doing the entire dramatic work — anticipates by three decades Cartier-Bresson's economy of the decisive moment of the intimate. The Library of Congress holds the print under LCCN 2005677531 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.), public domain since 1996. For Maison Picturale, The Kiss is a study case for our platine-palladium workshops: the print's bias toward the long mid-tones — where skin, hair and dark fabric overlap in a single tonal envelope — is precisely the register that the platine-palladium MP chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale preserves on 640 g/m² cotton paper, without the platinum-salt handling hazards of the historical 1904 process. Compared to Käsebier's contemporaneous Mother and Child platinum prints, The Kiss demonstrates White's tighter, more reductive compositional grammar — a quality that Steichen, in his Camera Work essays, identified as the defining mark of the Ohio pictorialist.

Reference file : Library of Congress (via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)