Pasanggrahan bij Muntok 1900 - 1922

This photographic stereo card, Pasanggrahan bij Muntok, captures a scene by Robert Julius Boers, a Dutch photographer. It's all about seeing double, right? The light here is hazy, like a memory. It's printed on a card, and each image is like looking through a different eye, trying to make sense of the depth of the scene. Look at how the sepia tones soften the edges, making the scene feel like it's from another time. The trees are like a screen, filtering the light, and the building behind them feels almost ghostlike. Focus on the way the trees are arranged, they have a quality of both presence and absence, which is sort of dreamy. I wonder if Boers was thinking about how we see, about how two images can create a whole new world? This reminds me a little of Atget, maybe because both of them saw the world as something to be carefully documented. Art isn't just about what we see, but how we see, and this little card is a great example of that.