Gezicht op een verijst water, waarop mensen met (paarden-)sleeën, en een boot before 1905

This anonymous photograph captures a winter scene of people with horse-drawn sleighs on a frozen waterway. There’s a looseness and freedom to the way this image has been captured, which feels like a refreshing counterpoint to so much staged or formal photography. The sepia tones create a sense of warmth, while the details in the figures and boats suggest a layered, almost dreamlike space. Look at the horses - you can almost see their breath in the cold air. Then there are the skeletal trees in the background. There’s a kind of dialogue here, between the solid forms and the hazy atmosphere, between the real and the imagined. It reminds me a little of Peter Doig’s paintings – the way he uses light and color to create mood, or even Gerhard Richter's blurred photographs, because it invites us to get lost in the process of looking and feeling, rather than trying to pin down any fixed idea. For me, this piece is less about what it depicts and more about the possibilities of seeing.