Mostar in Joegoslavië, april 1943 1943 - 1944

These four photographs of Mostar, Yugoslavia, taken in April 1943, give a panoramic view of the place. They're pasted onto a dark grey page. I'm thinking about the anonymous artist here, and the materiality of the photographs. When you make a painting, the whole thing is about material. I bet this person traveled there. I see water everywhere and it makes me think of the gesture of photography. What it means to arrive somewhere new, with only a camera as your tool. I see the camera almost as a kind of brush—a way to record and express a specific way of seeing. Here it seems that the artist is trying to encompass as much of the landscape as possible. It makes me think of all the landscape painters, from the Hudson River school to Cezanne. Each trying in their own way to distill something essential about the world through the act of looking and recording. What the artist sees and what they leave out.