Bekroning van de preekstoel in de Nieuwe Kerk te Amsterdam 1911

This photograph captures the Nieuwe Kerk pulpit in Amsterdam, and like much artmaking, the process is front and center. The almost monochrome colour palette of the photo, heavy on browns, makes the image feel like a shadow, or maybe a memory. The frame is cropped just above the arches, but there is enough detail to suggest the scale of the space the pulpit occupies. The eye is drawn to the complexity of the object: the statues and decoration. The details are amazing. You can sense the artist’s hand and their commitment to embellishment. It is like you are seeing into another world that is highly wrought, yet almost ghostly in its depiction. There's a tension between the flatness of the photographic surface and the depth of field and the architectural subject, a quality that always makes me think of the photographs of Thomas Struth. In the end, the image invites us to contemplate the nature of belief, the weight of history, and the silent dialogue between image and object.