Else Wachenheimer-Moos en twee onbekende vrouwen met hoeden op voor een struikenhaag 1932 - 1938

This is a small, black and white photograph, likely from the early 20th century. It shows three women with hats in a garden, anonymous hands capturing an everyday scene. The tonal range feels really compressed here, like a painting where someone has used a limited palette, perhaps using burnt umber and ivory black. I’m really drawn to the way the hedge dominates the foreground, its density and texture almost obscuring the house in the background. It’s a bit like the way Agnes Martin’s grids create a kind of visual field, pushing everything else back. The hedge is cut very square but from the leaves that protrude from the side, you can see the process of growth taking place, very slowly. There’s something about the ordinariness of this scene that feels very modern. The artist Corrine May Botz springs to mind, for her interest in vernacular photography, and the hidden emotional narratives embedded in mundane imagery. What are these women talking about? We can only imagine, and in this act of imagining, the photograph becomes a space for projecting our own thoughts and feelings.