Brug over een sloot before 1898

This photogravure, "Bridge over a Ditch," was created by Hugo Henneberg, an Austrian photographer who died at the end of the First World War. Henneberg, along with Heinrich Kühn and Hans Watzek, formed the Vienna Camera Club, known as the Trifolium, who significantly influenced the development of artistic photography around 1900. They pioneered new printing techniques which allowed them to manipulate the image and create painterly atmospheric effects. The image before us depicts a bridge so small, it seems that it could only be for the use of animals or those who live off the land. It has a kind of quiet solemnity. Henneberg seems to ask: "how do we get to the other side?" perhaps implying how do we get to the other side of war, or despair, or industrialization? This artistic approach to photography encouraged the medium to be seen not just as documentation, but as a form of personal and emotional expression.