Zes portretten van Herman Besselaar, Berti Hoppe en kennissen c. 1930

Berti Hoppe created this set of gelatin silver prints of Herman Besselaar and others, and assembled them into a photo album. The placement of each photo is quite deliberate, creating a series of contrasts: the hard and soft, the formal and informal, the natural and artificial. Look at the way Hoppe has arranged these images on the album page. These images are all about texture, light, and the interplay of human figures within their settings. In one photo, three women stand shoulder to shoulder in the water, their swimsuits tight to their bodies. Adjacent to this, we see more formally dressed individuals, posing in front of a building. This album reminds me of the work of collage artists like Hannah Höch. She used photography to challenge traditional notions of beauty and identity. Hoppe may have been doing something similar, using the camera to document the world around her, but also to create a personal vision of it. In the end, though, art is not about answers, but about questions, about seeing the world in new and unexpected ways.