Ploegen van het land before 1905

Curator: We’re looking at "Ploegen van het land," a gelatin-silver print rendered by James Craig Annan some time before 1905. Editor: Oh, right away it feels like a poem. So grey, so still…it’s almost meditative, like watching the world breathe softly. Curator: Indeed. Annan's landscape invokes the aesthetic principles of Impressionism. Note how the composition reduces forms into simplified tonal masses. Observe also the almost painterly softness, blurring the precise boundaries that we find in typical documentary photography. Editor: Right! It’s not about crisp edges or showing every last detail, is it? Instead, you get this sense of light and atmosphere washing over everything. Even though it's black and white, I can almost feel the damp earth and cool air. What are those indistinct, cloudy figures? Are they horses? Curator: Those would be oxen actually, yoked together, and appearing to till the field in the photograph’s background. It presents us with an articulation of labor via light and shadow; an almost allegorical interplay of substance and essence. Editor: That feels right. I get the allegory thing big time. The oxen could easily symbolize, well, I don't know...persistence or resilience or any old virtue. But more, though, it also says something about our place in things. It is less about any heroism and all about simply being a part. Curator: You astutely highlight its ambivalence. The romanticism and its documentary function compete. It seems Annan consciously complicates the viewer's understanding. This tension, of course, gives the photograph much of its dynamic intellectual character. Editor: True. This isn’t some straightforward pretty picture. It lingers; there's a whisper to it that wants you to keep digging. You know, to see what else is buried in that field. Curator: Precisely. A landscape of layered readings indeed. Editor: Exactly. I find I want to re-interpret every time. Thanks!