Geënsceneerde voorstelling van soldaten van de New South Wales Imperial Bushmen rennend bij Mafeking 1901

This sepia-toned stereograph shows soldiers of the New South Wales Imperial Bushmen running near Mafeking. It was made by Underwood & Underwood. What I see here is process, not just in the making of the photograph, but in what it depicts; a mass of bodies in motion. I’m thinking about the layering of time and space, the way the image captures a frozen moment of action. The texture of the photograph is pretty smooth and the colour palette is so restrained, almost monochromatic, with muted browns and grays dominating. But what resonates most is the slightly blurred figures – maybe it was hard to capture people running in those days – this lends a sense of dynamism and urgency to the scene. That blur reminds me of the way Gerhard Richter uses blurring in his paintings, creating a sense of ambiguity and impermanence. Like Richter, this photograph embraces the imperfect and the open-ended, reminding us that art is not about fixed meanings, but about a continuous process of seeing, thinking, and feeling.