Groepsportret van onbekende mannen c. 1902

Here is a group portrait of unknown men, made into a small photograph, stuck into a book. I feel for the artist, Guillaume Ronchesne. The men stand posed in front of a grey brick building and door. All those small figures, all those serious faces, all those hats and coats! It feels as if he’s trying to capture a moment, an atmosphere, a connection between these unknown men. He squints into the camera, and snaps the shot, and there they are, forever frozen in time. And the book itself, with its brown paper pages, it all feels so antique and precious. It feels like a memento, a fragment of the past, preserved in this unique, odd, and ephemeral way. It's like a conversation between the past and the present, between the artist's intention and the viewer's interpretation, between the known and the unknown. Ronchesne creates a dialogue.