Voorstelling van Britse soldaten die een aanval op een heuvel uitvoeren 1901

This photo, whose maker is unknown, is of British soldiers charging up a hill, and it was made using photo-mechanical reproduction. What strikes me is the texture, or lack of it. Everything seems flattened, almost like a rubbing. The tones are so close, it's hard to separate the figures from the ground. There’s a strange kind of blur, like the scene is vibrating with tension. Look at the way the soldiers are arranged, a kind of organized chaos, fading into the distance. It reminds me of some of Philip Guston's later paintings, where figures are clumped together. But where Guston is playful, this is deadly serious. Both play with the way abstraction and figuration can coexist, blurring the line between representation and something more visceral. What is the war? What does the line of soldiers mean? Maybe it doesn’t matter; it's more about the feeling it evokes. Ambiguity is the artist's friend.