Sculpture Hall op het terrein van de wereldtentoonstelling in St. Louis (Louisiana Purchase Exposition), 1904 1904

Jan Schüller took this photograph of the Sculpture Hall at the world fair in St. Louis in 1904. It’s a small work, but it captures this massive building, surrounded by gardens, with the kind of restraint that reminds me of, say, Atget, and his quiet photographs of Paris. The tones are muted, almost monochromatic, and it’s hard to tell if that’s a result of the photographic process or the printing, or whether it was intentional on Schüller's part. The building itself is so solid and boxy, a real feat of early 20th-century architecture. But the thing that gets me is the surface quality of the print, with those little specks of foxing around the edges. It gives the image a kind of depth and texture that almost feels like brushstrokes. It feels wrong to talk about photography as 'painterly,' but I think the best photographers have something of the painter in them, or vice versa. Someone like Gerhard Richter, for example, who moves between photography and painting so seamlessly, or even someone like Corot, who understood painting as an ongoing conversation between the eye and the world.