Rotterdam gebombardeerd 1940 - 1945

This is an album page of photographs of the bombing of Rotterdam. It's anonymous, and undated, but it's clearly made with the tools of photography, emulsion, paper, light and devastation. The images, six in total, are small, almost like snapshots, each capturing a different facet of the city's destruction, a bit like a storyboard for an apocalypse. Look at the texture of these prints; they’re grainy and raw. The contrast is stark, highlighting the brutal reality of what’s been lost. They remind me a bit of the early Xerox collages made by artists like Sarah Charlesworth, using found images to create new meanings, although these of course carry an additional gravity. One image shows a bridge collapsing into the water, a scene of utter ruin, a metaphor for broken connections. As artists, we often grapple with destruction and creation, and this album speaks to this tension in a deeply profound way. I see the shadow of someone like Gerhard Richter here; both artists seem to see the process of making art as a kind of meditation on impermanence and the traces we leave behind.