Steiger bij plantage Accaribo 1913 - 1930

Theodoor Brouwers captured this image of a pier at the Accaribo plantation, maybe with a simple camera, sometime in the early 20th century. Looking at this, I feel a sense of calm, a quiet moment frozen in time. It’s muted and silvery. I wonder what Brouwers was thinking, framing the image in this way? Did he have a personal connection to the plantation, or was he simply documenting the scene before him? There’s something lovely in the way he composes the image, placing the figures just so. It is as though he is trying to find some human point in the vastness of the scene. Painters like Vilhelm Hammershøi come to mind. He had this sensitivity to color and light, using muted tones to create atmosphere. The image, its greyscale tones, almost looks like an X-ray and the light is muted and soft as though covered by a layer of tissue paper. Artists, we're all just chatting across time, riffing on each other’s ideas. It's more of a meandering conversation than a rigid statement. And it’s in that ambiguity that the real magic happens.