Groepsportret 1900 - 1922

This photographic group portrait was made by Robert Julius Boers, but we don’t know when exactly. It's a simple sepia-toned print, a scene captured with what seems like a direct, unadorned approach. What strikes me is the texture. It’s not just the surface of the print itself, but the depicted surfaces: the rough, thatched roof of the building, the sandy ground, and the varying textures of the sitters’ clothing. The way these details are rendered speaks to the materiality of the photograph itself. It's a conversation between light, chemistry, and paper. Look at the lower left of the photograph; a figure sits cross-legged on the ground. The simplicity of the pose, the way the light catches the folds of the clothes—there’s an intimacy there, a sense of a moment captured. It reminds me of some of the early modernist photographers, like Eugène Atget, who saw beauty in the everyday, finding poetry in the plainest of subjects. Boers seems to be doing something similar here, inviting us to look closely at the textures and tones, at the way light and shadow play across these faces.