Portret van een meisje, mogelijk Elise Burdet, liggend in het gras bij het landhuis nieuwe Lindenheuvel te Overveen 1907 - 1930

Adolphe Burdet made this small photograph, maybe of Elise, in a garden in Overveen, at an unknown date. The whole thing has a strange, dreamy quality to it, doesn't it? The colours are muted, almost desaturated, and the focus is soft. But it's the light that really grabs me. It's coming from everywhere and nowhere, flattening out the forms and making everything feel a little bit unreal. I keep coming back to the flowers in the foreground. They’re these little bursts of white against the dark green grass, each one slightly different from the others. It reminds me of how we try to capture a moment, knowing it’s always slipping away. Photography is like that too. It's like trying to hold onto something that's always changing. You can see that quality in the work of someone like Gerhard Richter, who also made paintings from photographs, smearing the image so it was barely visible. That is a whole other can of worms...