[Photo Collage: Two People Holding Girl in Water]

Art Historical Context

In this intimate photo collage titled *Two People Holding Girl in Water Uruguayan photographer Juan Pedro Chabalgo captures a tender family moment around 1875. The small-scale work (mount: 10.5 x 6.3 cm) depicts two adults playfully supporting a young girl in shallow water, evoking joy and everyday domesticity. Chabalgoity, active in Montevideo during photography's early commercial boom, specialized in portraits and scenes that preserved personal memories for middle-class families. Crafted from albumen silver prints—then the gold standard for sharp, richly toned images—combined with lithographs, the piece exemplifies mid-19th-century hybrid techniques. Albumen prints, made by coating paper with egg whites and sensitizing it to light, allowed for detailed reproductions from glass negatives. The collage format, layering photos with printed elements, foreshadowed modernist photomontage, turning snapshots into artistic compositions for albums or cartes de visite. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Photographs Department (gift of Drew Knowlton and William L. Schaeffer, 2017), this work highlights photography's shift from studio formality to candid, narrative scenes, reflecting cultural values of leisure and familial bonds in post-colonial Latin America. A charming glimpse into a bygone era!

About the Artist

Juan Pedro Chabalgoity · 1848–1909

Juan Pedro Chabalgoity (1848–1909) stands as one of the pioneering figures of Uruguayan academic painting, a generation that sought to establish a national artistic tradition while remaining deeply connected to European models. Born in Uruguay, he pursued formal training abroad, traveling to Europe to refine his craft in the manner of the academies then dominant on the continent. His formation pla...