Pad door het bos 1903 - 1910

Hendrik Doijer created this black and white photograph of a path through a forest, sometime between 1863 and 1925. It’s a pretty dense image, all sorts of tones, but I keep coming back to how the texture in the lower half feels so different from the top. I like how the darker shapes of the overgrowth at the bottom almost feel like a dark, gestural brushstroke against the paler grey of the sky, like a reversal of foreground and background. It makes me think about process and how we choose to represent what we see. What do we bring forward and what do we leave behind? This reminds me of the work of Edward Steichen, someone else who made landscapes using photography at the beginning of the 20th century. But where Steichen’s images are very clear and direct, Doijer leaves more to the imagination. There’s a sense of mystery here, a feeling that there’s more to this scene than meets the eye. Ultimately, it is a reminder that art isn’t just about what you see, but how you see it.