Ons huis in de Oranjestraat 1903 - 1910

Hendrik Doijer made this small cyanotype, “Our House in the Oranjestraat,” sometime between the late 19th and early 20th century. The tones are cool, like memory, with cyan-blue seeping into every corner of the scene. I bet Doijer liked walking around with his camera, seeing what caught his eye, and then freezing it in time. The exposure looks even, but the house seems to glow from within, as if illuminated by a ghostly light. It looks kind of lonely, too. Think about the process. You take the photo, but then you have to develop it in the darkroom, mix the chemicals just right, and watch as the image slowly appears. It’s like alchemy, turning light and chemistry into a little piece of the world that you can hold in your hand. The blue might mean something, or maybe it’s just the way he saw things. Maybe he was thinking about how fleeting everything is, how quickly things change.