Pasanggrahan bij Muntok 1900 - 1922

This is a stereograph by Robert Julius Boers, probably made with a camera and some kind of photographic emulsion. It is really more about the mystery of seeing itself, isn't it? I wonder what it felt like to be Boers, setting up the camera, framing this view of Pasanggrahan bij Muntok, probably in Indonesia. Photography is such a strange alchemy of light and time; Boers has fixed the landscape, but it also feels a bit like he’s captured a ghost, or a memory. I'm curious about those evenly-spaced trees that line the perimeter. There is so much rhythm to the mark-making, the repetition of the forms of trees like brushstrokes, that it becomes a visual language. Maybe he was thinking of the way other photographers were working then. Maybe he was thinking about how we might see the world differently, or maybe he just liked the trees. It’s all a conversation through time, this art thing. Artists learn from each other, steal from each other, and riff off each other. It’s like one big, messy, creative jam session.