The 18th Century That Never Was

Photographer Joanna Kustra works at the intersection of photography and Photoshop in a way that makes the process invisible—which is the hard part. The results look like rediscovered oil paintings from a private collection that hasn’t been dusted off since the 1780s: faces rendered in candlelight that was never actually there, fabrics that seem to have absorbed decades of drawing room conversation.

Looking at them I kept drifting toward Pride & Prejudice and The Duchess—those period films that make you briefly mourn a version of the past that probably wasn’t as beautiful as it looked, but felt like it must have been. What I keep coming back to is the language of that era. There’s a formality to eighteenth-century written expression that I find myself strangely envious of—every sentiment mediated through structure, every feeling dressed before it left the house. I’ve been threatening to write something in that register for a while now. You’ve been warned.