Portret van drie mannen in pak voor struiken 1909

Geldolph Adriaan Kessler took this photograph, Portret van drie mannen in pak voor struiken, sometime in the first half of the 20th century with what I assume was a commercially available camera. It’s like one of those moments in painting when you start layering dark tones to build up the underpainting. The photograph has this incredible range of grayscale tones, where the light seems to almost evaporate as it gets caught in the thicket of shrubbery around these fellas. The texture of the grass and leaves feels almost tactile, like you could reach out and feel the dampness of the earth, or the prickle of the bushes. You can almost imagine the scene, these men in their suits standing awkwardly amidst the undergrowth, a bit out of place, a bit melancholic, and the light filters through the leaves creating dappled patterns on their faces and clothes. It brings to mind the work of someone like Eugène Atget, who wandered around Paris documenting the city and its people with a similar sense of quiet observation. Both artists seem to be drawn to the everyday, finding beauty in the mundane and the overlooked. It's all about embracing the ambiguity, allowing the image to breathe and suggest multiple stories rather than one definitive truth.