Landschap, met op de achtergrond een gebouw before 1903

This landscape, with a building in the background, was photographed by Alfred Horsley Hinton in London. Look how the light seems to pool and gather, as if the image was made with liquid silver. It’s all about tone, and the blurring of edges. See the way the trees reach out with bare limbs, like the gestural marks in a drawing? It’s almost as if he was painting with light, and maybe that's the root of all photography. The photograph almost dissolves into abstraction in places. I am reminded of the landscape paintings of Gerhard Richter, where the familiar and the strange collide. It’s that sense of something half-remembered, half-glimpsed, a landscape that is both there and not there. This work reminds us that photography, like painting, is about how we see, not just what we see.