Twee foto's van een steengroeve in Valkenburg en een optocht met koningin Wilhelmina in Amsterdam Possibly 1923 - 1925

Hendrik Herman van den Berg made these two photographs, "Twee foto's van een steengroeve in Valkenburg en een optocht met koningin Wilhelmina in Amsterdam", mounted together, and the tonal range in both is like a memory, or a half-remembered dream. The grainy texture and limited tonal range almost seem to collapse the space in the images. In the image of the stone quarry on the left, a figure stands at the base, dwarfed by the scale of the rock. It’s easy to miss them at first, but they’re essential: without them, we wouldn’t get a sense of scale. On the right, the crowd watching Queen Wilhelmina is captured with the same textural, grainy quality, which I think speaks to the way public spectacles are always partly obscured by the crowd. Both images seem to be studies in scale, reminding me a bit of the compositions of someone like Eugène Atget. Like Atget, van den Berg seems to understand that the best pictures are often the ones that leave you with more questions than answers.