Bouw van een woonhuis 1914 - 1919

This photograph, "Bouw van een woonhuis," shows a house under construction, its creation a moment captured by an anonymous photographer. Look at how the brickwork rises, solid and repetitive, each unit carefully placed, a kind of building up, a process. The grey scale flattens the image, but there's a palpable texture to the photograph, the grain of the paper. Think about those bricks, their rough edges, and the way the light catches them. It is about material transformation, labor, and this interplay between the built environment and the lush, enveloping nature behind it, those fronds which look like strokes of a brush. The photograph shares something with the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their typologies of industrial structures, it creates a record, a way of seeing, making us think about the act of building itself. And like all good art, it leaves you with questions, not answers.