Portret van een onbekende vrouw 1905 - 1928

This is a photograph of an unknown woman by Jacobus Marinus van der Peijl. It is a small print with a portrait of a woman, and I’m immediately drawn to the tight tonal range and the way the image sits between clarity and ambiguity. Looking at the details, like the lace collar, I get a sense of the material. The image itself isn’t crisp; there’s an attractive fuzziness, especially in the darker areas of the dress and backdrop, which is the opposite of the smooth, airbrushed perfection you get now. I love this, the image's very materiality invites me in. It's the kind of imperfection that makes you want to reach out and touch, feel the texture, maybe even smell the paper. Thinking about how Van der Peijl constructed this image, I think of how photography, just like painting, can be a process of building up layers, of selectively revealing and concealing. It's this tension between clarity and mystery that keeps me engaged. Much like the work of someone like Atget, Van der Peijl's photograph is an invitation to imagine an entire life around a single image.