Drie Wehrmachtsoldaten 1940 - 1945

This is a small photograph, made by an anonymous artist, maybe using their own camera, and now held at the Rijksmuseum. It’s that black and white that gets me. The way everything is flattened, turned into shades. The tones are very similar, without much contrast between the figures and the background. It gives you a sense of how something is made through the process of photography; how that chemical process and the light, change things in the world. There's a kind of accident in the top right corner, where the surface seems to be coming apart. Like time has been eating away at it. Like the photograph is coming back to the dust it came from. It makes me think of Gerhard Richter, and how he takes photographs and then paints them, blurring them, trying to turn them into paintings. It’s about how one thing translates into another thing. It’s an ongoing conversation, a back and forth. Nothing stays still.