Six photographs from the series "Estonian Types"

The invention of photography offered science, which until then had relied on manual depiction, a new, more precise, and faster way of creating images. Of course, the lightning-fast image-making we know today was still far in the future. The exposure time of the world’s first photograph lasted eight hours. By the mid-19th century, when the first photographer working in Estonia, Charles Borchardt, opened his studio in Tallinn’s Old Town, exposure times had shortened to around ten seconds. His services at that time were accessible only to the wealthy: nobles, merchants, industrialists, but also professionals such as teachers, doctors, or lawyers – all of whom had to remain perfectly still in front of the camera.

In 1867, Borchardt won a silver medal for his portrait series Estonian Types at the All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition of the Society of Naturalists at the Moscow University. On display here are copies of six surviving images, which are also the oldest known photographs depicting Estonians. Because, in addition to the long exposure time, the light-sensitive emulsion had to be prepared immediately before photographing, the entire process at that time took place within the walls of the studio. Borchardt’s “types” are real individuals, yet in the photographs they are torn from their usual environment and, for the duration of the long exposure, precisely arranged according to the hand of the Baltic German photographer. It is important to note that these portraits were not commissioned by the sitters themselves, but created primarily for Borchardt’s personal profit. There is no question of naturalness here; rather, the photographs present us with various exoticised stereotypes – the so-called last savages of Europe