Exercitie 1940 - 1943

This is a page from an anonymous photo album called Exercitie, and it's just fascinating. The photos are small and square, arranged on the page like little windows into another world. They are these black and white prints, but they have so much texture, it is almost like you could reach out and touch them. The contrast is intense, with deep blacks and bright whites that make the images pop, so they don’t quite sit flat, and instead lift off the page a little. Look at the photograph in the bottom right of the album, and notice how the grainy quality blurs the lines between the soldiers in the foreground and the landscape behind them. It is as if they are both part of the same, slightly out-of-focus, world. I think of Gerhard Richter when I see this, because both artists play with focus and blur to create a sense of distance and ambiguity. There’s no right way to see this, just different ways of looking.