Duitse officieren 1940 - 1945

This album page of black and white photographs depicting German officers was assembled by an anonymous maker, at an unknown date. The arrangement of images on the page is interesting to me; the maker has left plenty of room around each image, as if trying to create some space for quiet reflection. In the bottom left image, we see a young man sitting at a desk with flowers, a little like a still life. There’s something about the stark lighting that gives the image an eerie stillness, like an Edward Hopper painting but drained of all color. The contrast between the hard, angular lines of the desk and the soft curves of the floral arrangement feels really loaded, and that tension is mirrored in other images on the page. It makes me think of Hannah Höch and the way she used collage to question the narratives of her time. The page is a kind of collage, and it invites us to consider the stories that it tells, and also the stories that it leaves unsaid.