Tombeau Imaginaire 19 2019

Elina Brotherus made this photograph, ‘Tombeau Imaginaire 19’, sometime in the twenty-first century. Just look at the grey rocks and the green trees, like an early color photograph. But in this scene, someone stands on a stone right in the center. Maybe Brotherus was thinking about the 19th-century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. He made paintings of people dwarfed by nature. I can imagine she was trying to think through how she saw her place in the world, just like Friedrich. The woman seems to be an active participant, not just a passive observer. It looks like a performance. I think about how the practice of painting can act as a mirror, reflecting both the inner thoughts and the outward expressions of the artist. Like Brotherus, we artists today are in an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas across time, inspiring one another’s creativity.