Portret van Netta Bergsma als eenjarige baby, zittend naast een verjaardagstaart op Sumatra 1920

This small black and white photograph shows Netta Bergsma, aged one, with a birthday cake, on Sumatra, and was made by an anonymous photographer. The print is small, like a memory in your pocket, and the composition is simple: the baby, the cake, a frond of some exotic tree poking into the top of the frame. What intrigues me most is the way the light is handled, soft and diffuse, almost flattening the image into a series of tonal gradations. The details are smudgy; we can only guess at the texture of the cake’s frosting or the fabric of the baby’s dress. And yet, it's the very softness of the image, the way the forms blend and bleed into one another, that lends it its dreamlike quality. It reminds me of some of Gerhard Richter’s blurred photographs, not in its look but its capturing of a moment, but also in its suggestion of memory being imperfect, and subjective. Photography, like painting, can embrace ambiguity, allowing the image to exist in a space between clarity and abstraction.