Schoorsteen in het stadhuis van Kampen 1904

This photograph shows the Schoorsteen in het stadhuis van Kampen, the chimney in Kampen’s town hall. It was taken by an anonymous photographer for Monumentenzorg, which translates to ‘care of monuments’. I’m taken by the soft tonality of the image, which mutes the details into something abstract. It’s almost like a charcoal rubbing. When I’m making art I find that the actual moving around, the putting down of colour, creates its own logic, a sense of something emerging. The chimney is so elaborate, a whole history in stone, and the figures are like ghostly sentinels. The texture is the thing I find most fascinating here: the grainy quality of the photograph itself seems to mimic the texture of the stone. You can almost feel the cool surface and the marks left by the sculptor's tools. It is the way the photograph captures the surface of the chimney that makes this photograph sing. Thinking about other artists who deal with the surface, maybe Cy Twombly would have loved this image. Art, like life, is an ongoing conversation, and this photo has plenty to say.