Man en vrouw in Nederland 1913 - 1930

This is a photographic slide, showing a man and a woman in the Netherlands, by Theodoor Brouwers. It's a simple image, captured without fuss, and has the quality of a candid snapshot. The subjects are frozen in a particular place at a particular moment in time. What gets me is the texture of the photograph itself. The emulsion is imperfect and lends an abstract quality. These imperfections can be seen across the frame, a kind of fog, clouding the detail of the image and dissolving the sharpness of focus. Look closely at the top left corner and you can see where the image is peeling away from the glass. This feels like a painting by Gerhard Richter, who re-photographed images from newspapers, printed the image onto canvas and then dragged paint across the surface to disrupt the clarity of the subject matter. Like Richter, Brouwers is not so concerned with capturing an exact likeness of a particular scene, but more interested in how the passage of time and the process of making changes and obscures the image.