Young Women in Old Clothes: The Politics of Adolphe Braun’s Personifications of Alsace and Lorraine

Adolphe Braun's personifications of the French border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as young girls in regional costume were photographed about 1871, at the time of the Franco-Prussian war when the provinces were ceded to Prussia. Intended to illustrate the sorrow felt by the provinces at being torn from France, the images were immensely popular,. The metaphoric use of the human body renders it a map of social relations and these geographical "portraits" are no exception. They provide a provocative case study of the interplay between class, gender, and nation in France in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Moreover, these are living human bodies that were configured by the relatively new medium of photography then considered an objective, mechanical, and "realist" form of representation. Braun's use of photography for political allegory thus highlights the negotiations and tensions between actuality and symbol present in all representation. [Author]