Portret van een onbekende jongen 1900 - 1914

This is a photograph by Atelier Wertheim, “Portret van een onbekende jongen”, and well, who knows when? It could be anytime, really. Look at the grey scale, the tonality, which gives it this otherworldly presence. What always gets me about portraiture is the balance of something posed and something real, and in the grays we see something ghostly that suggests a realness that is beyond the image itself. The hat and coat are so heavy looking, you can almost feel their textures. It gives the figure this really solid, material presence. Look at the child’s hand tucked into the coat. The light falls across it and gives the whole picture a kind of gravity. This reminds me of early work by Gerhard Richter, with this sense of a frozen moment in time, that nevertheless still speaks to us. But that’s the beauty of art, right?