Portret van Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann before 1903

This is Aura Hertwig’s portrait of Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann, made with a photographic process. I love looking at the values in a black and white image, it lets me focus on the structure. Here, what really grabs me is the surface, the way the photograph sits on the page, a kind of meeting place between the image itself and the texture of the paper, which has an almost painterly quality. Look closely, and you’ll see what I mean; the tones are soft and subtle, and there is a real delicacy to the way the light falls across Hauptmann’s face. It’s a reminder that artmaking is always a conversation between the artist, the materials, and the subject. You see this kind of approach in the work of someone like Gerhard Richter, who really interrogated the meeting of painting and photography. Ultimately, this photograph, like any artwork, is an invitation to slow down, look closely, and see the world in new ways.