Zeilschepen en (vermoedelijk) een marineschip voor de kust van Nederlands-Indië c. 1920 - 1930

Klaas Kleiterp made this photograph of sailing ships and a navy vessel off the coast of the Dutch East Indies. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on, but I love the tonal range in this image. I like the way the picture plane, with its muted grays and browns, offers a lesson in seeing, of looking for subtleties in things. There's something incredibly seductive about the surface of this print. I keep coming back to the wave in the foreground. It's a simple form, but the way it's captured, it feels so tangible, like I could reach out and touch the cool, salty water. The texture is smooth, but you can still sense the movement and energy of the ocean. The details are sharp, but slightly blurred, which gives the scene a hazy, dreamlike quality. This piece reminds me a little of Gerhard Richter's seascapes, which also play with the boundary between abstraction and representation. Like Richter, Kleiterp seems interested in capturing the essence of a place, rather than simply documenting it.