Anna Pavlova, 1915

What the photograph shows

Genthe posed Pavlova full-length, mid-movement, against a plain dark studio backdrop: a pale, loose-fitting tunic wrapped in an embroidered cloth, a ribbon in her hair, arms spread wide, one foot raised onto pointe. The floor beneath her is dark as well, carrying a carpet pattern that barely survives in the negative. Neither the catalog record nor the image itself names a city or a specific performance, so none is claimed here.

What is certain is the date and the sitter — a dancer Genthe photographed at the height of a career that had already carried her, and the company she led, across stages worldwide, with her later years based in London. Genthe himself is better remembered today for two very different bodies of work: his portraits of dancers, Pavlova among them, and his photographs of San Francisco in the days after the 1906 earthquake.

What happened to the negative

This exposure survives as a nitrate negative — the flexible, plastic-based film stock of the era, cataloged as LC-G39-1163 in Genthe's collection. Negatives of this era age in several ways at once, and the one that dominates here is silver mirroring: metallic silver from the image itself migrates to the surface of the emulsion and settles there as a faint reflective layer, usually thickest in the darkest parts of the frame. Left unaddressed, that layer sits over the picture like a dark, faintly metallic film. This is the same kind of damage our guide to restoring old negatives covers in more depth, including what a scan can and cannot recover from it.

On this particular negative the effect was unusually advanced. The Library of Congress's own curatorial essay on the Genthe negatives singles this one out, noting that it "exhibits a more advanced stage of deterioration" than most of the collection, with mirroring across the image and staining along the borders. In the upper right corner, someone had also marked the plate with its archive number, 1163, in white paint directly on the emulsion, and the edges of the plate itself are uneven where the nitrate stock was trimmed.

What was repaired

Restoration lifted the mirroring and returned the tones to something close to their working range: the tunic reads pale again, the studio backdrop reads a deep, even black, and the stains and abrasions along the edges are gone. The archive number "1163" and the negative's uneven cut edges are gone too — both were marks on the plate, not part of the photograph Genthe took, so removing them is closer to cleaning the window than editing the view through it. The carpet pattern on the floor is also clearer now than it is on the negative itself, and the photograph comes back in color. The color is inferred by the model: the photograph recorded light and shadow, not hue.