Untitled 1910

This is an untitled photograph of a storage room made by Lewis Hine. It’s moody and kind of mysterious; I'm drawn to the play of light and shadow. There is a lot of light, but it’s not really clear at all. It's almost like Hine created the image through a process of intuition and experimentation, responding to the atmosphere of the space and the way the light filtered through. I wonder, when he was creating this work, was he thinking about how the photograph’s surface might feel like a tangible, almost sculptural presence? The wood panelling that encloses this small and stuffy interior is really interesting. It feels like a metaphor to me: each panel is a world, separated and yet unified with all the others. It has got me thinking about the relationship between photography and the wider world, the way in which one medium speaks to another, the ways in which artists are in ongoing conversation, inspiring each other's creativity. Ultimately, for me, it is about ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations and resisting any fixed reading.