Kongsihuis by Robert Julius Boers

Kongsihuis 1900 - 1922

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photography, gelatin-silver-print

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portrait

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african-art

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street-photography

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photography

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group-portraits

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gelatin-silver-print

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watercolor

Dimensions: height 65 mm, width 75 mm, height 88 mm, width 178 mm

Copyright: Rijks Museum: Open Domain

Robert Julius Boers made this stereograph, sometime near the turn of the 20th century. It’s a photograph printed in tones of brown and cream. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about this image, the subjects are posed rather stiffly, and the cream colour makes me think of sepia-toned memories. The light in the image is hazy, as though it was taken on a hot day. If you look closely, you can see dustiness to the print itself. This lends a certain texture to the surface, it almost feels as though the scene is emerging from a cloud of dust, as though memory itself. The composition is split into two parts - like a double vision. When I look at this work I think of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who also captured architectural subjects in a detached style. But where they sought to classify and record, Boers seems more interested in atmosphere. It seems to ask; what can the camera see that the eye cannot?

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