Gezicht op de Hervormde Kerk te Oudenhoorn 1907

This photograph of the Gezicht op de Hervormde Kerk te Oudenhoorn was taken by an anonymous photographer, sometime in the past, as a piece of documentation. The soft sepia tones create a kind of ghostly feel, as if the image is surfacing from a dream. It's like the building itself is almost breathing, the way the light catches on the texture of the stone. You can almost feel the history in the way the light and shadow play. I'm drawn to the way the top of the steeple just barely pokes into the sky, a delicate point of focus. I find myself thinking of Atget, another photographer obsessed with documenting the world, with his simple, unaffected pictures of Paris. Art is always in conversation, a continuous back and forth across time and space. Photography, like painting, is always an interpretation, not just a reflection of the world. It’s more like a translation, full of its own kind of beautiful ambiguity.