Heerenstraat te Paramaribo 1903 - 1910

Hendrik Doijer made this photograph in Paramaribo, and there's an amazing haze of light about it. Looking at this, I’m thinking about how an image documents a moment but also creates one. I love the way the composition is built up, kind of bottom to top. There are these light figures in the foreground, some children maybe, and the eye is drawn up through the darker trees towards the buildings behind, which are almost ghostlike in their paleness. You can almost feel the heat coming off the road. I am drawn to the way the figures are captured, frozen in time but also full of movement and potential, and how the tones are so subdued, and everything is so softly rendered. This feels so in line with a lot of painters I admire, like Gerhard Richter, who explores how photographs and paintings can inform one another, or even someone like Luc Tuymans, who uses muted tones to create a sense of distance and unease. With artists like these, nothing is ever truly fixed, is it?